


something wanting in our natures

by branwyn



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Darcy Lewis & science, F/M, Past Abuse, Protective Bruce Banner, Protective Tony Stark, Rare Pairings, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, the whole soulmate thing is actually really complicated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-07-19 13:50:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7363882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy meets her soulmate. It's basically a complete disaster.</p><p> </p><p>*Story is on hiatus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the poem "The Old Astronomer to His Pupil".

If you happened to be a nosy person with access to a file containing the complete life story of Darcy Lewis, you would probably assume that the worst thing that had ever happened to her in twenty-eight years of life was the whole fake soulmate thing back in college. That’s if you leave aside getting attacked by dark elves and Asgardian murderbots; both of those things were scarybad, but they hadn’t just happened to _her_.

That’s not the way Darcy sees it, however. Before she goes to work at Stark Tower, whenever she tries to put her finger on the moment that things started going seriously wrong in her life, she always comes back to the Science Tragedy she suffered in high school.

Obviously, the soulmate thing was bad. Like, deeply traumatizing and whatever. But it was eight years ago, and she’s mostly over it by now. She never believed in all that destined-by-fate romantic crap anyway. Darcy is a strong independent singleton who don’t need no soulmate, and anyway, what did Disney know about about happily ever after: their theme parks are havens for serial killers, if the internet is to be believed.

Anyway, in the really good stories, you always fall in love with your soulmate before you even _know_ they’re your soulmate. And if you’re already in love, who _cares_ whose Words you were born with?

*

For the longest time, no one knew that, when Darcy was a kid, she wanted to be a scientist. 

She blames TV for fostering her delusions of grandeur. Between _Mr. Wizard_ and _3-2-1- Contact_ and that one weird show on her local public access station about time-traveling teenagers, she grew up with the idea that all you needed to break into STEM fields was a healthy curiosity and a plentiful supply of baking soda and aluminum foil. 

In elementary school, science was all about turning celery sticks blue with food coloring and growing rock crystals from sugar water and building self-contained ecosystems in terrariums. In elementary school, science was _accessible._

Everything changed in high school, and not for the reasons everyone assumes. Yes, sexism is a problem in math and science classes. Girls aren’t encouraged to do their best. They don’t raise their hands as often as the boys, and when they do, their teachers don’t call on them. 

That is a real thing and a real problem. It just wasn’t Darcy’s problem. 

The problem was that her ninth grade bio teacher was one year away from retirement and had basically lost the will to live, much less fight with the school board over the fact that his classroom didn’t have textbooks, or a single functioning microscope. The problem was that her school didn’t even have a chemistry teacher, just a rotating schedule of substitutes who passed out worksheets and didn’t even collect them at the end of class. The _problem_ was that the only other science options at her shitty school were Animal Behavior (“Go home and teach your cat to come running when it hears the can opener.”) and Outdoor Science (“Here’s a hall pass. Go outside, pick some leaves, look ‘em up, try to figure out what kind of tree they came from.”)

Before Darcy starts working at Stark Tower, the only person she ever explains the full scope of the Science Tragedy to is Jane, and that’s because Darcy really, _really_ wants that internship. It’s right after the whole fake soulmate debacle, and she’s starting to feel like she’s lost pieces of herself that she’s never going to get back. Maybe, she thinks, it will help if she can just live in the desert for a few months with a couple of astrophysicists, learning cool shit about stars and outer space.

Some people would probably say it was tacky of her to turn her interview with Jane into an episode of Sad Backstory Hour just to get a job, but Darcy’s thinking realistically: there is nothing in her coursework or on her resumé that makes her a viable candidate for an internship with an astrophysicist, and the fact is, she doesn’t really have a lot of shame when it comes to pursuing things she wants.

Anyway, it _totally_ works. By the end of the interview, Jane’s eyes are huge and misty; she stands up, gives Darcy a tight, awkward hug, and starts teaching her how the equipment works.

Darcy never actually intended to make a complete career switch from political science to science-adjacent administrative support, but the thing was, Jane _needed_ her. Jane didn’t seem to realize she needed her; Jane hardly seemed to notice that she was around most of the time. But Darcy didn’t mind that. She liked their relationship. She was more or less alone in the world by that point, her mom having died a few months after Darcy left for college, and besides, Jane’s work was legit _changing the world._ That was the kind of thing Darcy had always wanted to be a part of; that was why she’d wanted to be a scientist in the first place. 

So after her internship is over, she finishes up her last nine credits long distance from London, and shortly after she graduates, Jane absentmindedly agrees that Darcy can come with her to Manhattan. Working for Stark Industries means never having to apply for a grant again, and as the person who has to copyedit Jane’s grant applications (which is a nice way of saying _translate_ them from abstract scientific jargon to concrete language that actually matches the terms of the grant), Darcy is all about that. She’s also about getting paid a real salary, _finally._

She is slightly less about the fact that shortly _after_ they pick up and haul their crap to Manhattan, Jane goes on an extended sabbatical to Asgard with her hunk-of-burning-Nordic-deity, and Darcy is emphatically not invited. But, speaking of people who need her, by that point she’s met Bruce Banner, and expanding the terms of her job description from “assisting Jane” to “assisting needy scientists in the vicinity of Jane” just feels like the natural career move.

Darcy and Bruce get along like a house on fire, which is not necessarily something that anyone would have predicted happening, but that’s because very few people get over themselves long enough to actually _talk_ to Bruce. Otherwise, they would know that under the shy, self-effacing exterior, he has a sly, sarcastic sense of humor that complements hers _so_ perfectly that if it weren’t for the little matter of their Words, Darcy would have assumed they were destined by fate to be together.

Even before Jane leaves, Bruce divides his time between her physics lab and Tony Stark’s workshop. He works alongside Jane because their fields actually overlap a bit; he works with Tony, whom Darcy has yet to meet, because Tony is his best friend, and weirdly needy, and also really possessive of Bruce’s time. 

Bruce could totally have his own lab, but here’s another thing most people don’t bother to find out about him: he actually hates being alone. He’s gotten used to it over the years, but now that he has the option of human company, he really prefers it. Darcy is just grateful, because otherwise, he probably wouldn’t be so amenable to keeping her on as an assistant after Jane takes off; she’s not under any illusions that she actually has a lot to contribute to his work otherwise, although the look of astonished wonder on Bruce’s face when she overhauls his filing system does a lot for her self-worth.

By the time Darcy has been working at Stark Tower for two months, she and Bruce are legit friends, which is how he ends up being the second person who gets to hear the epic tale of Darcy’s Science Tragedy. He’s not really the type to chat while he’s working, but there’s always downtime in the lab while the machines are doing their thing, and one day he admits to being really curious about how Darcy had ended up…doing what she does.

Bruce kind of has a doctorate in Sad Backstory, which makes it pretty easy to talk to him about this kind of thing, so Darcy tells him the whole story. She tells him about her parents, and about the kind of school she went to. She skips the fake soulmate thing (Bruce’s soulmate is somewhere in Virginia having babies with another man, and she doesn’t want to make him broody), but she goes into dramatic detail about the moment in ninth grade when realized that reading all the free articles on the _Scientific American_ website was never going to make up for her school not having a single properly outfitted lab, but that she could totally download _Das Kapital_ and _Wealth of Nations_ for free online.

A kid from a shitty school can get themselves up to speed in the humanities on their own, if they’re dedicated, she explains, while Bruce looks at her with his sad, serious little face. But it just doesn’t work like that in the sciences. You need _stuff_ to do science, and there’s a limit to how much you can do with baking soda.

Yet another thing about Bruce Banner that most people don’t know is that he gets _really_ worked up about stuff like the state of the American school system, and all children having the right to an equal education. And he is exactly the kind of massive nerd who thinks it’s incredibly heartwarming that little Darcy read her library’s one tattered copy of _Pale Blue Dot_ so many times that an exasperated librarian finally told her not to bother returning it. 

(Darcy still has that copy. The cover is held on with rubber bands, and it is one of her most cherished possessions.)

The way Bruce seems to see it, the one thing he’d had going for him as a kid was access to an excellent education. Apparently, when your father has a Ph.D., going to college is something you can take for granted—even if your father is, in every other way, a massive jackhole.

Afterwards, Bruce starts taking the time to explain his projects to her at a level of detail Darcy can mostly understand. It’s incredibly sweet, and it makes Darcy feel a little like, maybe, Science Tragedy or not, her life hasn’t taken such a wrong turn after all.

Then she meets Tony Stark.

*

It was inevitable that Darcy would meet Tony Stark eventually. She works in his Tower, in one of his labs, with his best friend. She hasn’t tried seeking him out—the man has a reputation, and she’s seen what Bruce looks like when he staggers into the lab after a few hours under Tony’s thumb; Stark is a hot mess, and he spreads it around—but she’s more than a little curious what he’s like in real life. He’s hot, after all, and a superhero, and he is responsible for the fact that Darcy earns a real paycheck now, so all things considered, she’s pre-disposed to like him.

But then their first encounter goes something like this:

It’s month two of Jane’s Asgardian not-honeymoon, and Darcy is looking forward to a quiet day of hanging with Bruce, doing his paperwork, fielding the requests he gets for interviews and appearances, filling orders for replacement equipment, and sorting through emails from the many, many scientists around the world who are either hot to work with him, hot to get their hands on the Hulk, or hot to disprove his theories. She’s even brought him coffee. Bruce gets a little uncomfortable when she does that, because he’s not used to people being nice to him and he’s afraid she’ll feel demeaned or whatever, but Darcy likes coffee; Darcy stops at the Starbucks in the lobby on her way in every morning to get coffee for herself; getting coffee for Bruce at the same time isn’t a problem. Unlike Jane, Bruce doesn’t abuse his caffeine privileges.

Darcy hears an unfamiliar voice in the lab when she stops in the doorway to hang up her hat and coat, and when she turns around, she sees Bruce huddled behind his desk, his shoulders up around his ears, while Tony Stark perches on the table facing him, flipping a stylus from hand to hand.

The bits of conversation she overhears as she approaches, coffee in hand, go a long way towards explaining why Bruce looks so hunted.

“I’m just saying, this torch you’re carrying, it’s gonna burn you, my friend.” Tony jabs Bruce’s arm with the stylus. “Live a little. You gotta put yourself out there, meet new people.”

One of Darcy’s expert skills includes running interference for friends who are trapped in awkward social situations, so she walks right up to Bruce with a big smile that pointedly excludes the man next to him.

“What’s the story, morning glory,” she says lightly. “Cinnamon latte today. Don’t make that face, it’s delish.”

Bruce looks relieved to see her, and he’s just opening his mouth to thank her when Tony interrupts.

“Now _that_ is what I’m talking about.” Darcy turns, just in time to see Tony hop down from the table and walk around her in a circle. His eyes wander from her neckline (which is not that low) to her ass (which is—it’s just her ass, okay, she’s wearing jeans. Normal ones, they’re not even that tight.) 

Tony ends up standing behind her, so he can’t see the look on her face, but Bruce does, and his expression of relief turns a little frozen.

“She’s totally your type too, right?” says Tony—and his hand comes to settle on Darcy’s shoulder, like he’s _presenting_ her to Bruce. “With the eyes and the…” 

Darcy can’t see what sort of gesture he’s making, but she doesn’t have to; she can guess. 

Bruce’s frozen expression converts to one of intense suffering, which is the only reason Darcy doesn’t start looking for ways to set the lab on fire. Instead, she turns around until she’s looking Tony in the eye. He’s beaming so hard that it distorts the line of his goatee, and if it weren’t for the fact that she really likes cinnamon lattes, he would be wearing hers right now.

“Bruce,” she says, not taking her eyes off Tony. “Coffee.” She thrusts the cup behind her.

The cup is removed from her hands. She holds Tony’s gaze a second longer; his eyes have gone a little wide, like he’s confused what he’s done to merit the palpable waves of hostility she’s radiating. Then she turns, deliberately giving him her back.

Bruce’s eyes are soft and apologetic, and she gives him a small smile before stalking over to the desk she’s appropriated on the other side of the lab.

The thing is, they could have been fine after that. Darcy is, unfortunately, used to having her body appraised by men she’s just met; it’s a douchetastic move, but under normal circumstances she would just wait for the opportune moment to replace Tony’s beard wax with Nair or something, and they’d be even. Problem solved.

Except that the situation quickly escalates past the point where Nair-related reparations are possible, because Tony just. Keeps. Talking.

“See, Bruce?” Tony’s voice isn’t nearly as low-pitched as he seems to think it is; she can hear him even over the work-appropriate volume level of her email-sorting playlist. “She smiled at you, brought you caffeine. She’s clearly into you.”

Darcy wonders exactly what kind of dating experience Tony Stark has had that he thinks coffee and smiling are unequivocal signs of interest. He’s not wrong that she _likes_ Bruce, of course, but there are _steps_ between liking someone and wanting them to jump your bones. 

She suspects that Bruce is trying to explain this very thing to him, based on the terse, muttered replies he’s making. Darcy can’t hear those, because Bruce actually knows how to keep a private conversation private.

“Well, you obviously like her,” Tony snorts. “You’d never let some random intern put her hands all over your research if she didn’t look like that.”

Darcy has shoved back from her desk and is on her feet before she’s even conscious of having moved. A heavy silence settles over the lab, but she doesn’t turn around. Summoning every scrap of dignity and composure she possesses, she picks up her purse, pivots on the heel of her boot, and stalks out of the lab, because at that point, the only alternative is to set _Tony Stark_ on fire.

She ends up crying in the stairwell for half an hour before texting Bruce about a fake plumbing emergency back at the walk-in closet she rents from two lawyers and a busker, and going home early.

*

The problem, Darcy explains to herself, fuming in her seat on the city bus, isn’t that Tony was teasing Bruce about her. There is nothing insulting about the suggestion that Bruce might be into her or vice versa. Hell, she would totally have asked Bruce out by now, if it weren’t for…reasons that definitely have nothing to do with her Words being an illegible stain on her inner forearm.

It’s not even about Tony’s gross, objectifying comments. It’s about the fact that Tony as good as said that the only reason a serious scientist would let her work for them was because she had a nice pair of tits.

Darcy is aware that this is a sore spot for her in a way that Tony couldn’t possibly know about, and therefore he’s not _completely_ responsible for how upset she is right now. But it was still a callous, sexist, misogynistic thing to say about anyone. Which is why she ignores the email Tony sends her, apologizing, about an hour after she leaves the Tower. 

She ignores the next two as well. And the three after that. The man is dating Pepper Potts, right? Let _her_ give Tony his much-needed crash course in Feminism 101. As for Darcy, she’ll accept Tony’s apology when he figures out what it is he should actually be apologizing for (right now he’s stuck on the Bruce thing. Which, again, Darcy doesn’t care about.)

Darcy doesn’t have much of a life outside of work. When she first got to Manhattan she kind of resented the fact that Jane got to live rent-free in Stark Tower, while Darcy was stuck trying to make a much smaller salary stretch to include the cost of rent, transportation, _and_ student loan repayments. Now she’s grateful for it; if she didn’t have to trek to and from her closet every day, she would literally never see the sun. (Not that there’s ever sun in Manhattan anyway, with all the buildings.) Her roommates are never home, except for the busker, who is always home, and who Darcy suspects of going through her stuff in search of money or weed or maybe a sense of purpose in life. She doesn’t go out on the weekends, except to get groceries from the corner store. Once or twice a month she’ll make herself see a movie, but the fact is, when she thinks of relaxing on her own, she immediately thinks of lying on a comfortable flat surface with her phone or laptop, watching episodes of _Cosmos_ , or reading Tumblr.

Jane was the same way, and if Bruce ever leaves the Tower, she has yet to catch him doing it. Darcy’s not the least social person she knows, but she kind of thinks she’s the one who minds her lack of social life the most.

Normally, she doesn’t even mind that badly. But sometimes—like when Tony Stark has just implied that her professional qualifications can be summarized by her dress measurements—she could really do with a distraction, or someone to talk to.

She’s used to being on her own, but she could strongly do without all this self-pitying _loneliness._

*

When Darcy gets to work the next morning, Bruce is waiting for her. 

No sooner has she walked through the door than he’s crossing the room to hug her, which nearly gives her a heart attack.

“Oh my god, are you _dying_?” she says, as best she can with her face pressed against his shoulder. “Wait—holy shit, is it Jane, did she—”

“No one’s dying,” Bruce tuts, and lets her go. His hand lingers on her shoulder. “I just wanted to do that. Honestly, I was a little afraid you might have quit.”

“Dude, no way. I told you, I had a plumbing emergency.” It wasn’t a lie; her eyes were leaking all day.

The corner of Bruce’s mouth tips up. “Right. Come sit down, I want to talk to you about something.”

Bruce leads her over to her desk, where there is a stack of books that weren’t there yesterday. All of them are brand new high school level science textbooks: biology, chemistry, and physics.

Darcy looks at Bruce, confused. His smile is shy and uncertain.

“I thought, if you wanted, we could get you caught up,” he says. “You’re more than smart enough to get a handle on the introductory level material just by reading these on your own, and I’ll help you with the lab components. When you’re done, we can move to more advanced material. By the end of the year, you could be sufficiently caught up to start an undergraduate degree, if you wanted. Or you could keep studying with me, and gradually you could take on a more active role here in the lab. With all the practical experience you have already, you could be a qualified lab tech in hardly any time.”

Darcy has never been this stunned in her life. (Well, once or twice maybe—getting attacked by an Asgardian murderbot had been pretty stunning—but never in a _good_ way.) 

Unable to look at Bruce directly, she runs a hand over the pristine cover and uncracked spine of the introductory physics textbook. “I don’t think I have enough math for this,” she says, because she rocked Algebra II, but then she graduated.

“Hmm.” Bruce frowns a little and makes a note on his tablet. “We’ll get to the math. Start with biology and chemistry. I mean…” he hesitates. “You don’t have to do any of this. This isn’t about the work you do here. You’re an excellent assistant already.” 

He doesn’t mention Tony, but Darcy knows he’s thinking about it. _You’d never let some random intern put her hands all over your research if she didn’t look like_ that.

“I want to. I do. This is…” Darcy swallows, hard, and to her horror, tears well up in her eyes. 

This is easily the most generous, thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for her, and if she and Bruce are friends for the rest of their lives she doesn’t know how she’ll ever pay him back.

“How are you single, anyway?” she says, sort of accusingly.

Bruce laughs, surprised. “I think you’re overestimating how appealing most people find me when I’m offering to tutor them in science.”

“I’m not estimating _that_. I’m estimating your big, squishy heart.” She gives him a watery smile. “Thanks.”

She ends up hugging him again. It’s less startling the second time.


	2. Chapter 2

Darcy gets three more emails from Tony that she doesn’t reply to, and then Tony starts hanging around the lab in person.

The first time he turns up, Darcy is already on her way out the door to get lunch. Tony blinks at her in passing; she narrows her eyes in turn; they both keep walking. 

When she gets back from lunch he’s over by Bruce’s workstation, and Darcy discovers that she just happens to have a lot of work to do on the opposite side of the room.

The next thing she knows, he’s a daily presence in her work space, and there doesn’t seem to be anything she or Bruce can do about it. She suspects that Bruce isn’t actually trying that hard to drive Tony away, but she forgives him—after all, he and Tony are besties, and the work they do is important. Anyway, she also suspects that Bruce had a stern word with Tony the day she ran out of the lab, because for all that Tony is constantly around, he never actually says a word to her.

There is no reason in the world why Darcy would ever _need_ to talk to Tony, and since he still hasn’t managed to apologize to her properly, she feels no desire to do so.

Tony, by contrast, seems to want her to talk to him, or at least _react_ to him, but he’s way too stubborn to break silence first. So he resorts to other tactics. He turns up on Friday with donuts, which he pointedly sets on the end of Bruce’s bench, as if saying, “You have to come to _me_ if you want sugary pastry goodness.” 

So Darcy visits the Starbucks in the lobby during her lunch break and buys herself an apple fritter, which she brings back to the lab and eats slowly, staring pointedly at Tony all the while.

By the middle of the next week, Darcy and Tony are fully embroiled in the most passive aggressive game of chicken _ever_ , and if Bruce rolls his eyes any harder, he’s going to break something. 

The thing is, Darcy is kinda having fun. She was irritated and angry in the beginning, but it doesn’t take long before she forgets about that, because she is also very competitive and very stubborn, and she is going to _win_. “Competitive” and “stubborn” are also adjectives that modify Tony Stark, of course, but Darcy has two advantages over him: one is the sweet, sweet moral high ground, and the other is 28 years of experience ignoring men who want her attention.

“You know,” says Bruce, one evening when they’ve stayed late so that Darcy can look at slides under Bruce’s supervision, “I am not defending the way Tony treated you, but he’s a lot sorrier about it than he lets on. He actually really likes you.”

“Uh huh,” says Darcy, blushing slightly behind the curtain of her hair as she bends over the microscope. 

Actually, she’s starting to like Tony too. They spend so much time not-talking to each other that she’s found herself paying attention to him in other ways. She’s noticed how he’s always looking out for Bruce, and how much he worries about Pepper, and how irritated he gets when tabloid websites speculate about Captain America’s relationship with the ailing Peggy Carter (Darcy has to give him that one; the woman is in a nursing home, for fuck’s sake). 

Darcy’s reluctant conclusion is that Tony Stark might be a bastard, but he cares about people, which is Darcy’s kryptonite. She can’t dislike someone like that, however hard she tries. 

On the other hand: “He could try apologizing to my face. For, you know, the _right thing_.” Liking someone and punishing them are not mutually exclusive propositions.

Bruce pushes his glasses up his nose. “Well, he’s also an idiot.”

“To paraphrase Sokka of the Water Tribe,” says Darcy, because thanks to her, Bruce gets that reference now, “We can talk when he’s sorry _outside_ as well as inside.”

Bruce smiles and ducks his head. “Fair enough.”

*

It’s entirely possible that Darcy could have lived and died without ever actually talking to Tony Stark: they are both of them just that stubborn. But then Tony and Pepper Potts break up, and suddenly she feels _sorry_ for the guy. 

He’s visibly a wreck, and Bruce starts apologetically asking if he can push their tutoring sessions around so that he can spend more time keeping Tony company in the lab. Darcy is totally fine with that; Bruce had been right about Darcy being able to grasp the material without too much help from him, so all they have to do is schedule their lab appointments around Tony’s projects.

The second time Bruce fails to turn up to one of their lab sessions, Darcy isn’t upset, mostly because she knows that Bruce would never flake on purpose. But it’s late, and she figures that if Bruce and Tony are still working hard enough that Bruce didn’t notice the time, they’ve probably not stopped for food or rest either. 

She has a vested interest in keeping Bruce upright and functioning, and Tony is sufficiently pathetic these days that she figures now is probably a good time to be the bigger person and let him have a win. So she walks down the street to a food cart that sells amazing chimichangas, then carries them back up to Tony’s workshop. 

JARVIS lets her in, of course, because she has JARVIS wrapped around her little finger. The secret is asking his opinion on things. No one does that, even though JARVIS has _lots_ of opinions.

Bruce notices her as soon as she walks in; his jaw drops, and he immediately checks the time. “Oh no. Darcy, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t trying to blow you off.”

She gives him a bright smile. “No, it’s totally cool. Tutoring can wait, but I’m guessing that dinner has been waiting for way too long already.” She presents Bruce with a carton.

Bruce opens the lid and inhales deeply. He actually shuts his eyes for a second. “You are a very good friend to me, Darcy Lewis,” he says emphatically.

“Same to you, Doc.” 

She glances from Bruce over to Tony, who is standing close by, looking down at a tablet. He’s not ignoring her so much as he’s minding his own business for once.

Darcy takes a breath, gives Bruce a look that says _here goes nothing_ , and walks over to Tony, thrusting the other carton under his nose.

Tony straightens slowly. He stares, first at the carton, then at her for a long moment, as if trying to read her intentions. Then he pops the lid and groans slightly.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, “where have you been all my life?” 

She smirks. “Recently? Right here.”

Tony freezes. His eyes, suddenly, are huge. A split second later, the penny drops on Darcy’s side.

“What the _fuck_ ,” she breathes.

Here is the thing about Darcy’s Words: they are the kind of words that anyone might say to anyone.

She’s not like Jane, whose Words are Nordic runes and can’t even be read by people who don’t have a degree in ancient Icelandic or whatever. She’s not even like her mother, whose Words were _hi my name is roger_ —generic, but at least they contained a hint of her soulmate’s identity. (Darcy’s father’s name, as far as she knows, is not Roger.)

Darcy’s Words are not only fairly common, they are—they _were_ —prominently placed on her inner forearm, where anyone can see them unless she’s wearing long sleeves. When Darcy was thirteen, her mother gave her the only piece of good advice Darcy ever got from her: “Be careful with them hanging out like that,” she’d said, and for once she wasn’t talking about Darcy’s breasts. “People will take advantage.”

Darcy couldn’t figure out how that would even _work_. No one could fake having a soulmate that wasn’t theirs—that’s why everyone had Words. 

(She’d learned better a few years later, but at least it was after her mother died, so she never got a chance to say, _Told you so_.)

The real clincher isn’t the fact that Tony just said _hey kiddo where have you been all my life._ It’s the look of burning intensity on Tony’s face, because that seems like a pretty unambiguous indication that, whatever words just popped out of Darcy’s mouth, they also appear somewhere on Tony’s body. 

“You said ‘ _recently right here_ ’,” says Tony. “Those are my Words. What about you, what are yours, did I say—”

“Yeah.” Darcy cuts him off, feeling really light-headed. “Yeah, you said mine.”

If her life were a movie, Darcy would be springing into Tony’s arms right now, and he would be carrying her off, bridal style, somewhere private, so they could show each other their soulmarks. That’s tradition, after all; so is immediate co-habitation, tons of athletic sex, and a hastily arranged wedding.

Instead of doing any of that, they stand there, staring at each other, Tony looking as gobsmacked as Darcy feels. Finally, Bruce steps forward.

“I don’t understand,” he says carefully. “You guys met months ago, so how…?”

“We met, but we’ve never actually talked,” says Tony, his tone careful and blank. 

“Seriously?” Bruce looks incredulously at Darcy. “I knew you guys were messing with each other, but—not once?”

Darcy shakes her head. 

“Until now.” Tony looks uncertain, and Darcy is grateful for that, because she is freaking out on a level that is likely to induce hyperventilation, and she doesn’t think she could deal with Tony being enthusiastic, or however it is people normally act in these situations. 

But then Tony squares his shoulders, and gives her a direct look, and she has a strong suspicion that she’s not going to like whatever comes out of his mouth next.

“Okay,” he says. “Don’t be insulted, but I don’t actually know you that well.”

“Uh, same to you?” Darcy frowns.

“And people have tried to fake me out with this before.”

Darcy’s entire body goes cold and still. 

“Fake you out how?” says Bruce. 

“All it takes is someone finding out what your Words are and arranging an encounter so they can say them to you. What are you gonna do, not give them the benefit of the doubt?” Tony shrugs. “A lot of people have seen me naked.”

Darcy stares at him, trying to work out exactly what he’s accusing her of. “You think I tracked down one of your exes and got them to tell me your Words so I could…do what, exactly?”

Tony’s face gives away precisely nothing. “It would be pretty good payback for me being an asshole to you.”

Darcy nods slowly. “Yeah, that might be the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Bruce clears his throat, and Darcy knows that look; it’s his Conflict Resolution Face. “Maybe you guys should just go somewhere in private, before anyone,” he looks right at Tony, “says anything they might regret later.”

Tony arches an eyebrow at Darcy, like it’s a challenge. It’s all Darcy can do not to start laughing, because this? This is a nightmare. It’s a special nightmare, handcrafted by the finest nightmare-makers, just to bring her worst fears to life.

“You okay, Darcy?” says Bruce, when a few seconds go by and she still hasn’t spoke.

“I can’t,” she says.

Bruce frowns. “What?”

Darcy is looking at Tony. “I can’t show you my Words,” she says.

And just like that, the light in Tony’s eyes flickers and goes out. For an instant, he looks bitter; then he shrugs dismissively. 

“Right.” He picks up the carton she brought him and starts back towards his work station. “Good try, anyway. Thanks for dinner.”

Darcy watches him for a long moment; his shoulders are stiff, the line of his back ramrod straight, and he’s throwing projections around furiously, as if he’s dismantling everything he spent the day building. She watches him until she can’t breathe anymore, and she wonders if heartbreak and heart attacks are actually the same thing.

Bruce steps up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Darcy, hey—hey, you’re okay, what’s wrong?”

She’s breathing _too_ fast, she realizes, like her chest is too shallow to hold all the oxygen she needs. She’s going to be sick, or pass out; her whole body’s going to fold like a cheap card table, and if Bruce tries to hug her, she’s going to do it right here where Tony can see.

“Darcy, look at me.” Bruce grips her hand. “You’re hyperventilating, you need to breathe.”

From the corner of her eye, Darcy sees Tony’s head whip around. His face is a mask of anger and confusion.

Darcy shakes Bruce’s hands off her and starts to _run_.

*

She isn’t really surprise when Bruce finds her about ten minutes later, back in the emergency stairwell that is rapidly becoming her “flee from Tony Stark” safe space. She’d meant to just go home—it is late, after all—but having panic attacks on the bus is not as much fun as it sounds like, and besides, this is Stark Tower: literally no one uses the fire stairs unless there’s an actual fire. 

“Hey,” says Bruce, catching sight of her from the doorway. “JARVIS told me you were here.” 

Darcy nods. She’s sitting on a step at the top of the landing, leaning against the concrete wall. She doesn’t bother looking at Bruce; she took her glasses off because they always fogged up when she cried. Her whole world is just a teary blur right now.

Bruce comes over to sit beside her, close enough that their hips are touching. The cold of the stairwell is bleeding into her, but Bruce is very warm. 

“I’d ask if you were okay, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer,” he says, his tone gently humorous.

Darcy shrugs listlessly. “I’ll be fine. Just having a moment.”

“That was quite a moment,” he says. “In the lab, I mean.”

“Finding your soulmate is _so_ romantic,” Darcy sighs. “That was _definitely_ worth waiting my whole life for.”

Bruce winces and tugs off his own glasses. “Yeah, about that. Tony would like another chance to talk to you.”

Darcy gives him her most unimpressed eyebrow-arch. “That really wasn’t the impression I got.”

“I think he’s figured out that he misinterpreted the situation,” Bruce says. “I did point out to him that even though _he_ doesn’t know you very well, you and I have actually become pretty good friends over the last few months. _I_ know that there’s no way you’d ever mess with someone’s head like that just to pay them back for being a jackass.”

“He was right, though, about people faking their Words.” Darcy wraps her arms around her torso. “Totally happens.”

“Sure.” Bruce frowns slightly.

“The worst part about it…” She takes a deep breath. “Everyone is like, _how could you not know?_ Like there’s some kind of mystical magical glow in your heart of hearts that tells you for sure that this is the real thing. There _isn’t_ ; that why we have _Words_. If someone—cheats you like that, how are supposed to protect yourself?”

Bruce looks at her for a second; then he puts his glasses back on, as if he needs to be able to see her for this. “Are you…speaking from experience?”

She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t have to. 

“Oh, Darcy.” Bruce’s sigh seems to come from to bottom of his being. “What a mess.”

“I don’t know how to tell Tony,” Darcy admits. “I don’t know if I _want_ to tell him.”

“I don’t think you would need to say much. He’s very smart; he can fill in the blanks. And despite the way he’s behaved around you recently, he’s actually very kind.” Bruce shrugs. “But you don’t have to talk to him tonight. Or at all, until you’re ready.” 

“I don’t think I can really go back to ignoring him in the lab,” says Darcy.

“Tony isn’t going to bother you while you’re at work.”

Darcy gives Bruce a look of pure skepticism. “Says who?”

Bruce’s face remains expressionless. “Says me.”

She nearly laughs; this is Bruce, the gentlest, most easygoing person she knows. Except for the whole Hulk thing, of course. Actually, yeah, now that she thinks about it, Bruce totally has a scary streak. 

“I should go home,” she mutters.

Bruce stands and holds out his hand. He tugs Darcy to her feet and guides her to the door. “JARVIS, can you call a car and a driver to meet Darcy out front?”

“I was just going to take the bus,” Darcy protests.

Bruce shakes his head. “You’ve had a long day. You need to be alert when you’re taking public transportation, and I think you should just relax for the rest of the night.”

Darcy has to admit that the idea of just being able to sack out in the backseat of a town car sounds really good to her right now. “Tony isn’t going to mind? It’s his car.”

“I promise you, he won't.”


	3. Chapter 3

When Darcy turns up for work the next morning, Bruce nowhere to be seen, but his desk is occupied. By Tony.

He’s looking down at a tablet and he doesn’t seem to hear her come in at first. Judging from the circles under his eyes, and the fact that he’s wearing the same shirt and jeans as yesterday, he hasn’t been to bed yet, so he’s probably not at his sharpest.

She hovers there in the entrance for a moment, uncertain whether she’s ready for this conversation. But then Tony looks up, and his eyes lock onto her.

“Please don’t go,” he says in a rush, and that’s when Darcy realizes she’s already started backing up.

Tony jumps down from the table and strides over, stopping about three feet away from her. He rocks back on his heels and jams his hands into his pockets. “Can we talk?” he asks, in a quiet voice.

Darcy considers her options, but they all seem to lead to a night of lying on the mattress in her closet, wondering what Tony would have said if she’d just given him the chance. So she folds her arms over her chest and nods. She hasn’t taken off her coat and hat, and her bag is still over her shoulder. She can always make a quick break for it if the conversation goes in a direction she can’t handle.

Tony takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. About yesterday. I kind of jumped to conclusions. There aren’t a lot of people I trust, and some of them turned out not to be…” He shrugs indistinctly. “I’ve got baggage, is what I’m saying. I know it’s not a good excuse.”

Well, at least he’s apologizing for the right thing this time. Darcy can give him some points for that.

“It’s cool,” she says. “I get it.”

“Yeah?” His gaze narrows. “What do you get?”

He could stand to be a little less defensive, she thinks, considering that he’s the one who wanted to talk. But there’s something about his stance, his tone, that makes Darcy think he’s feeling a lot more vulnerable right now than he wants to let on. It doesn’t exactly give her the upper hand, but she can appreciate the fact that Tony’s the one with most of the questions, and she’s the one with the answers.

“Just, what you said, about people messing with you. I guess you have pretty good reasons for being suspicious.” She grimaces. “And I didn’t make it any easier by freezing up like that. I mean, what were you supposed to think?”

Tony seems to relax a little, or at least his shoulders look a little less stiff. “Yeah, what was that about, anyway? I mean…I get that I’m not in a great place to demand explanations, but that was kind of weird.”

Darcy rubs her arm, anxiety knotting her stomach. This had been easier with Bruce; but then, Bruce wasn’t her soulmate. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “You just…you needed something from me, something totally reasonable to ask for, under the circumstances, and I couldn’t…” She trails off, miserably.

“So, I really can’t see your Words?” Tony frowns. “Wait. Are they, like, in your bathing suit area or something?”

Darcy is so startled that she laughs. That _does_ happen—there was a girl in her eighth grade gym class whose soulmark had only ever been seen by her doctor—and for a second, she couldn’t help wishing her problems were that simple. “I would have just told you that,” she assures him.

“Okay.” Tony’s mouth twitches a little. “Just, I can see how that would be awkward.”

“Totally awkward.”

“But not the problem here.”

“No.”

“Okay. But.” He swallows. “You _are_ my soulmate.” 

And there’s the vulnerability, out in the open now. Darcy thinks about what she knows of Tony—how often he’s around the lab, or the Tower in general, how few people ever come up to the private floors. It’s strange to think of a person with Tony Stark’s reputation being lonely, or lacking for companionship in any way. But what if he is lonely? What if, every time some asshole said his Words to him, he felt that strange, fragile hope rising in his chest, only to have it squashed flat when they turned out to be just another con artist?

Darcy never thought she would find herself feeling protective of Tony Stark, but apparently that’s part of how the whole soulmate thing works.

“You definitely said my Words,” she tells him. “So. Yeah. Seems that way.”

“Okay.” Tony nods, like he’s prepared to take her word on that, at least for now. “Are you, uh, okay with that?”

Darcy smiles at him. She had the whole night to think this over, and while she has reservations about the soulmate thing in general, she can’t think of any objections she has to Tony that can’t be cleared up by a couple of decently serious conversations.

“It’s definitely not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she says.

She’s afraid that won’t be enough for him, but Tony actually grins. “Good. Ditto, by the way.”

Darcy takes off her hat and coat and hangs her bag on the coat rack. She’s committed to having this conversation now; she might as well be comfortable. “So is this gonna be weird for you?” she says, while she doesn’t have to look at him. “I mean, with the Pepper thing.”

She feels like she has to ask. It’s been a month since they broke up, and Tony hasn’t really shown any signs of letting up on his whole overcompensating-by-overwork strategy.

“Yes,” says Tony, and when she looks at him again, there’s an ironic twist to his mouth. “But not as weird as you might think. If anything, this helps.”

“Yeah?” says Darcy.

“Yeah. I mean, as distractions go, finding your soulmate is a pretty good one.”

“Cool, yeah, I can see that.” Darcy glances around the lab, and her eyes light on the crash sofa in the back. The sofa being here was all Darcy’s idea. Jane needed a horizontal surface for catnaps when she was on a work bender, and sometimes Darcy did too. She’d even caught Bruce there occasionally, usually with a science journal propped on his chest.

Darcy catches Tony’s eye, and nods toward the couch. They walk over together and sit down, Darcy tucked into the corner and Tony sitting sideways to face her. 

They’ve never been this close to each other before; definitely never while they were relaxed and sitting down. She can feel the heat of Tony’s leg not quite touching her knees, and it occurs to her that he might have misinterpreted the significance of the couch gesture. 

It would be easy, after all, to lean forward just a little bit, to angle her head towards his. Or for Tony to lean forward; the arm of the couch is at her back, and there isn’t any room for her scoot back and get more distance from him.

Tony’s eyes are bright and dark all at once, and she wonders if not being able to just relax into this makes her the worst, most disappointing soulmate ever.

“I’m gonna need some time,” she says, looking down at her lap. “You weren’t wrong about us not really knowing each other, and I’m not really down for…I mean, just because we’re soulmates, it doesn’t mean…”

“Me neither.” He cuts her off. “I don’t mean that you’re not—because you are, and I know I have this reputation, but. I was with Pepper for a long time. And even before that, I kind of…”

He seems to be having trouble articulating whatever’s in his head, so she takes a guess. “You aged out of the whole playboy thing?”

Tony jabs a finger at her. “This thing we have is way too new for you to be starting with the age cracks. But, yeah, basically. After Afghanistan…” He shakes his head, scratching at the spot on his chest where the arc reactor used to be. “Trust needed to be involved. It wasn’t any fun otherwise.”

“I totally dig it.” She nods, maybe a little too enthusiastically. “Same goes here.”

“Okay. Cool.” He drums his fingers against his knee. “In all seriousness, is the age thing weird for you? You’re like—what, 22 or something?” He winces.

“I’m twenty-eight. Twenty-nine soon. But thanks for that. And no, it’s not weird.”

“Really?”

Somehow, it never occurred to Darcy that Tony Stark was actually crazy insecure. “I mean, you’re plenty hot. And yeah, if you were creeping on women my age on the regular, I wouldn’t have a lot of respect for that, but this is different. It’s not like you get to pick the age of your soulmate.” 

Tony hesitates. “In the interests of full disclosure, in the past, I sort of—”

“Let’s not go there.” _Obviously_ she knows that Tony has slept with entire harems of younger women. She also believes him when he says that he’s changed. She might not have, if she hadn’t seen the evidence of it before he thought he had anything to prove to her, but she had, so she does.

Tony’s mouth twitches. “Got it. So, since you asked about Pepper, does that mean I get to ask you about Bruce?”

Darcy stares at him. “Dude, seriously?”

“I just want to know if I’m going to be stepping any big green toes here.” When Darcy just blinks at him, Tony shrugs, looking a little uncomfortable. “You guys seem kind of tight.”

Darcy rewards this with the eye-roll it so richly deserves. “We _are_. But the part where we have sex in the lab after hours was never anything other than a product of _your_ filthy imagination.”

“Huh.” Tony looks genuinely surprised. “He kind of let me have it after I ran you out of the workshop last night.”

“He’s a good friend,” she repeats. “Honestly? He’s probably my best friend.” She’s aware as she says this that Tony considers Bruce to be his best friend too—and what if that’s going to be an issue? What if he goes from being jealous of Bruce to being jealous of her?

Tony just nods, however. “Good. That’s good. He needs friends.”

“He’s got you.”

“Yeah, well.” Tony clears his throat, clearly embarrassed for some reason. “So, about us not really knowing each other that well. Can we fix that? Can I take you out to dinner or something?” 

Darcy tries to imagine having dinner with Tony Stark. Her brain produces a quick sketch of the sort of restaurant that would be involved, where the menus are in a foreign language and don’t have prices. She thinks about the kind of clothes a date like that would require, about awkward silences over appetizers and New York’s elite staring at them from the other tables.

“I don’t know,” she says, looking at her hands. “I haven’t dated anyone in a long time. I was sort of thinking…we could just be normal, for awhile? Like, here at work. We just keep doing our thing here in the lab, except now we actually talk to each other. Maybe get lunch sometimes.”

She’s afraid that Tony will be disappointed. Instead, his whole face is relaxed and warm, like her suggestion has come as a relief.

“I like how you think, Lewis,” he says. “Normal and boring, coming right up.”

*

Bruce wanders into the lab a few minutes later, clutching coffee from the Starbucks in the lobby in what Darcy can only mentally describe as a shifty manner. He’s obviously feeling a little guilty about having let Tony talk him into clearing out so that he could get Darcy alone. 

Darcy is already at her desk, looking over the morning’s emails, and Bruce walks over, wearing a sheepish smile.

“How’s it going?” he asks quietly.

“It’s all good,” she assures him. “Traitor.”

Bruce winces and hands her the coffee. “I got you your favorite flavor of bribe.”

“Mm. I suppose you’re forgiven. This time.” The coffee has cooled to the perfect temperature—hot, but not mouth-burningly so—so she abandons all pride and gulps it. She was so distracted this morning that she’d forgotten coffee entirely. 

“Tony promised me that if I let have him the room for an hour he’d go easy on you.” Bruce studies her for a moment like he’s trying to decide if she looks like someone Tony has gone easy on.

“We talked,” Darcy tells him. “It was good. We’re on the same page. Just gonna take things slowly.”

“Okay. Good.” Bruce smiles. “He’s a really good person, and he’s been a good friend to me. I think you guys could have a lot to offer each other.”

Darcy surveys him over her glasses. “Dude, you are really bad at the shovel talk.”

Bruce blinks. “Why in the world would I give you the shovel talk?”

“Isn’t that the kind of thing you do for your BFF?”

“Hmm.” Bruce shakes his head and starts messing with his tablet. “When it comes to this, I’m in your corner.”

Darcy beams at him.

“Besides,” he says, “If anyone’s going to give the shovel talk to Tony’s soulmate, it’s probably going to be Pepper. She’s known him a lot longer than I have.”

“Oh _shit_ ,” Darcy hisses, and Bruce winks at her before wandering over to his desk.

*

Despite the fact that Darcy and Tony had mutually agreed to lift the moratorium on talking to each other in the lab, the whole morning passes and they hardly say a word to each other. Tony and Bruce are engrossed in their project, and once Darcy has finished the day’s paperwork, she presses her nose firmly to the grindstone of her chemistry textbook. 

As soon as noon rolls around, however, Tony is at her desk, bobbing slightly on his feet. “Delivery, cafeteria, or diner?”

Darcy blinks at him over her glasses. “Huh?”

“For lunch. You said we could get lunch.”

Actually, Darcy had been thinking of lunch as something they could work up to once they managed to pass a couple of normal days in the lab together. But seeing the undisguised eagerness on Tony’s face, she feels her hesitation melt.

“Cafeteria,” she says. “It’s stroganoff day.”

Tony makes a face, but he doesn’t even try to talk her out of it. “Bruce, we’re going for lunch. You coming?”

Bruce looks up, startled; then he glances at Darcy, and whatever he sees in her face has him smiling and shaking his head. “I’m good. You kids have fun.”

Tony stands pretty close to her in the elevator. He’s not crowding her exactly; it’s more like he needs the reassurance that she’s close by and not about to disappear. Darcy guesses that watching her run out of the lab on him twice had given him a kind of complex. 

He doesn’t really talk to her, though, which surprises Darcy a little. Tony’s a motormouth. Under normal circumstances, so is she. 

“Okay,” she says. “I think we just need to suck it up and play truth or dare.”

Tony looks at her like she’s crazy. “Is this lunch or a middle school slumber party? If it’s a slumber party, I need to swing by the penthouse for booze.”

“We lost the flow, dude.” Darcy watches the lights on the button panel next to the elevator door. “Or we never had the flow in the first place, what with the silence and the weaponized donuts and the cheap comments about the structural integrity of my blouses. We finally broke the ice; now we have to jump in the water.”

Tony looks like he’s fighting some kind of inner battle, probably over the comment about her shirts. She’s actually kind of proud of him when he keeps his mouth shut. “Fine. Truth or dare.”

“Truth.”

“Oh, we’re starting now. Okay.” Tony contemplates her for a moment. “Why the fuck is Banner teaching you chemistry?”

“Damn, Stark, start with a softball why don’t you.” Tony frowns, and Darcy waves him off. “No, fine, whatever. Bruce is helping me get caught up with all the science I missed out on in school.”

“Yeah, obviously. But _why_?”

“Because.” Darcy takes a deep breath. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist.”

She knows there’s no way Tony will understand that this is one of her biggest secrets, and that he’s only the third person she’s ever told it to, but she still feels like they’ve passed some kind of threshold together.

“No kidding?” Tony folds his arms over his chest. “Then why didn’t you major in a science?”

“Because all the microscopes at my high school were broken and I had to work 30 hours a week to make sure the lights stayed on at home.” Darcy tosses her hair, just to put him in his place. “My turn.”

Tony looks like he has a lot more follow-up questions, but he bites back his protest. “Fine. Truth.”

Darcy is really glad he said that, because she’s not actually sure what kind of dare she would have made him perform otherwise. (The problem isn’t thinking of something for him to do; it’s that she can’t think of anything he _wouldn’t_ do.)

“How are you doing with the whole…” Darcy gestures vaguely towards his sternum, where the arc reactor used to be. “Surgery thing.”

Tony’s face goes a little blank. “What do you mean?”

“Are you okay? Did everything…heal? Does it hurt?” She knows that Bruce helped him through getting the arc reactor removed, but he didn’t talk about it much. Doctor-patient confidentiality was involved, or something.

“Ah.” The lines around Tony’s mouth smooth out. “Surgery was a success. The grafts took cleanly. It’s probably not a good idea for you to punch me in the chest, but when is that ever a good idea?”

“I notice you didn’t answer the last part.”

Tony grimaces. “I have bad days occasionally. I manage it with beta blockers, for the stress. I’m not gonna drop dead over stroganoff, Lewis.”

“Never said you were,” says Darcy, delicately, as the elevator door dings open. “I choose truth, but let’s save it till we get our food.”

Darcy gets the stroganoff, because it’s disgusting and just a step above Hamburger Helper, and it reminds her of her childhood. Tony gets a BLT, a bowl of minestrone, and a slice of cheesecake. Heads turned their way as they go in search of a table, but no one points or stares or bothers them. Either the average Stark Industries peon gets used to seeing Tony around the Tower and stops being star struck pretty early on, or people are so convinced that Tony Stark would never eat lunch in his own cafeteria that they assume the guy in the worn Metallica t-shirt and grease-stained jeans can’t possibly be him.

Tony, considerately, lets her eat about half of her stroganoff before picking the game up again. “Why was it on you to make sure the lights stayed on at home?”

Darcy lifts her fork and narrows her eyes at him. “You mean you haven’t read my SHIELD file?”

Tony shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “I was going to, but Bruce seemed to think I should wait and let you tell me stuff.”

“And you listened to him?”

“I listen to Bruce all the time!” Darcy blinks. “Most of the time. Look, if I was going to listen to anyone, Bruce would be the guy. And he knows you, so I figured his advice was relevant in this case.”

“I appreciate the restraint.” Darcy takes a bite and chews thoughtfully. “The really juicy stuff isn’t in the file anyway. SHIELD is good, but I tend not to leave paper trails.”

Tony gives a loud bark of laughter, and this time, when heads turn in their direction, they’re accompanied by irritated looks.

“Yeah, so. My dad took off when my mom was still pregnant with me. Never met the guy, don’t care to. And my mom just wasn’t the type to hold down a job.”

Tony is stirring his minestrone without looking at it. “Health problems?”

“By my senior year, yeah. Before that, it was mental, emotional stuff. I mean, looking back, that’s what was going on. At the time I didn’t really think about it that hard.”

“Huh.” Tony’s expression is sober, a little thoughtful. “You still talk to her?”

“She died when I was nineteen.”

“Oh. Shit. Sorry.” 

Darcy shrugs. “It’s okay. Being an orphan doesn’t exactly make a person stand out around here.”

Tony snorts. “Ain’t that the truth.” He shovels some soup into his mouth. “But you did go to college, despite the…microscopes, and all that?”

“I got scholarships. And loans. So, so many loans.” Darcy shudders. “It was a great day in this girl’s life when you hired Jane, let me tell you. I am still adjusting to the miracle that is a steady paycheck, even if ninety percent of it does go to loans and rent.”

“Rent?” Tony scowls. “What rent?”

Darcy blinks. “I know you’re a billionaire, but surely you’re familiar with the concept.”

“I mean—you don’t live in the Tower? Foster does.”

“Jane is my boss, not my mom. Co-habiting doesn’t come with the gig.”

Tony opens his mouth, and Darcy just knows that he’s about to make some kind of big, stupidly generous offer, and she can’t deal with that right now, so she says, “Your turn. Truth or—”

“Let’s just stick with truth. Daring each other is less fun when we’re both sober.”

“Fair enough.” Darcy takes a deep breath. “Okay, you don’t have to go into all the gory details here, but…why did you and Pepper break up?”

Tony doesn’t exactly drop his spoon, but he puts it down a bit too quickly. 

“Okay. I get that this is something you would need to know. Let me ask this first: why do you think we broke up?”

If they were talking about something less deeply personal, Darcy would give him crap about not adhering to the rules of the game, but she doesn’t actually want to make him uncomfortable, and if this will help him talk about it, she’s fine with venturing a guess. “I would say that you were probably worried about not being able to protect her, and she…probably felt the same way about you. I mean, you fight gods and aliens and senators. It’s a high-risk lifestyle; I totally get how that would put strain on a relationship.” She takes a bit of stroganoff. “How’d I do?”

Tony scratches his chest. “Uh, yeah, you…nailed it, pretty much.”

“You guys are still friends though, right?”

“Yes.”

No hesitation there. That’s good. Slight defensiveness in his tone: not so good.

“I’m really glad,” she says, and tries to sound like she means it, because she does. “Losing an SO is sucktastic. Losing a friend is a straight-up tragedy.”

Tony smiles. “Yeah. I can’t really do without Pepper. She’s one of my people.”

“Who are your other people?”

“Rhodey, he’s my oldest friend. Bruce. The rest of the team. Foster, lately.” He pushes his soup aside and reaches for his cheesecake. “You.”

Darcy is kind of startled by the warmth that blooms in her chest. when she hears that “Really? Even though this is our third conversation, and the first two kind of sucked?”

“You’re my soulmate. And I liked you anyway, albeit in a braid-pulling, schoolyard kind of way.”

“Yeah, maybe you haven’t heard, but there’s this new memo going around about braid-pulling: don’t do it. It isn’t cute.”

Tony grunts. “That why you didn’t reply to my emails?”

“I was waiting for you to apologize.”

“I apologized!”

“For teasing me about Bruce, and I didn’t give a crap about that. I was waiting for you to apologize for implying that I’m so incompetent that the only reason Bruce would let me work with him was if he wanted to screw me.”

Tony’s mouth falls open. “I…don’t actually remember implying that.” Darcy scowls. “But, clearly I did. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“How do you know that you didn’t mean it if you don’t remember saying it?”

“I recognize the sentiment as the kind of thing I might say as a joke, especially if I was trying to get a rise out of Banner, but I promise that I never actually thought that about you.”

Darcy still feels like there’s a lecture about objectification that Tony sorely needs, but he’s trying, and she finally got her apology, so she nods. “Apology accepted.”

“Okay. I gotta say, this game idea didn’t suck. I feel like we’re really making progress here.”

Darcy beams at him. “All my ideas are good ideas.”

“I strongly suspect that not to be the case, but I will accept your premise for the time being.” Tony scrapes the raspberry topping off his cheesecake with the side of his fork. “So, we’ve talked about Pepper, which is sort of it for me, when it comes to relationships measured in units of time longer than hours. What about you?”

“Uh.” Under her sleeve, the dead tissue that used to be her soulmark gives a purely psychosomatic twinge. “Not much to tell there.”

“Liar.”

“Hey!”

“Lewis, there is no way you got through four years of undergrad without a dating history. It’s a mathematical impossibility.”

“How does math come into this?”

“There’s an equation involved that factors your relative hotness against the number of horny 18 to 22 year old males in your vicinity during an average semester. Unless you took a vow of celibacy before your first rush week, there is no way you escaped unscathed.”

Darcy gives him a long, pitying look. “I realize this is the only time I will ever be able to say this to you, boy genius, but you need to check your calculations. You’ve failed to account for some critical variables.”

“Such as?” Tony leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. His eyes are bright, and the corner of his mouth is quirked upward.

“First of all, I had a scholarship to keep, so I didn’t exactly have time for keg parties at Sigma Tau Date-Rape or whatever.” She ticks her points off on her fingers. “Second, I took out minimal loans, so I was working part time in the library each semester, which left me with pretty much zero time for a social life. Third…the fact that I dated a guy for most of freshman and sophomore year doesn’t mean I _had_ to. There were compelling factors involved. I could _easily_ have graduated with a blank slate, relationship-wise.”

“I’m going to ignore the fact that you just proved my point for me—”

“I did _not_.”

“—and move straight to the important question: who was the guy?”

Darcy looks down at her plate. The remaining third of her stroganoff has cooled to the point of congealed inedibility. She pushes her tray away. “Just someone I met in econ.”

“Uh huh. You dated him for two years?”

“Little less.”

“Why’d you break up?”

She’s not going to get a smoother lead-in than this, and Tony was right; their conversation has been going really well, to the point that Tony doesn’t feel at all like a stranger anymore. 

The Stark Industries cafeteria at noon is decidedly _not_ the place for a full-length episode of Sad Backstory Hour, but she can tell him a little. She can tell him enough that maybe it will take some of the sting out of the previous night’s disaster, at least.

“I thought he was my soulmate,” she says, pointedly looking anywhere except at Tony. “He said my Words when we first met. He was missing the last two fingers on his left hand; he said that’s where his soulmark had been. It was actually on his bicep, and they weren’t my Words, but I didn’t find out until after we moved in together. So. That was that.”

A long silence follows, and Darcy can _feel_ Tony staring at her. She doesn’t look up, though, until she feels a warm hand come to settle over hers where it’s lying on the table. 

Tony’s eyes are dark and intense, and without really meaning to, she turns her hand over and lets him thread their fingers together.

“That,” he says, in a tight, controlled voice, “might be the worst thing anyone’s ever told me.”

Darcy hears the echo of the words she said to him last night. She feels a sharp sting at the corners of her eyes. Tony’s grip on her hand tightens.

“Seriously, that is some grade A sociopathic bullshit right there. Who the fuck does a thing like that?”

Darcy takes a deep breath. “It’s a thing some people do. You’d know, right?”

Tony grimaces. “Not really. No one who tried that on me got that far. Longest anyone lasted was an hour. Two years, though, that’s insane.”

“It was a long time ago.” She tries to shrug and ends up just hunching her shoulders defensively.

“I can’t believe you didn’t just tell me to get fucked this morning.” Tony’s huffs a disbelieving little laugh. “What is it about the women in my life being a million times classier than I deserve?”

“Whatever, Stark.” Gently, Darcy pulls her hand away from his, and uses it to steal the remainder of Tony’s cheesecake. “Buy me a pony, we’ll call it even.”

Tony immediately opens his mouth, and she just knows that he’s about to offer to buy her something. Maybe not a pony, but something.

So she scoops up some cheesecake with her fork and shoves it between his lips. He makes a high-pitched noise of complaint, but they polish off the rest of the cheesecake together in silence.

*


	4. Chapter 4

When Darcy walks into the lab the next morning, she knows immediately that something’s up. Tony is over by Bruce’s workstation, thrusting a tablet against Bruce’s chest, gesticulating and talking in low, angry tones. She assumes it’s related to their project, so she doesn’t interrupt them. She just leaves their coffee on a nearby table, where they’ll eventually spot it, and gets to work at her own desk. Tony and Bruce don’t even seem to notice that she’s there.

Waking up her laptop, she sips her coffee (gingerbread latte today) and checks her email. 

There’s a lot of unread messages. Like, an insane number of them. 

Darcy isn’t the type to let unread emails pile up in her inbox; she might not reply right away, but she always, always opens them as they come in. Fifteen is her average for new emails on a normal morning. 

Today, she has 135.

In amongst the Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest notifications, plus the emails advertising sales, and the pleas to sign petitions or donate to political campaigns, there are a lot of emails from people she’s never heard of. 

They all have subject lines that contain the words “Tony Stark”. They also contain words like “soulmate”, and “interview?” and “please confirm”.

Adrenaline spikes through her body so fast that her hands start shaking. She selects an email at random and opens it; it’s from a celebrity gossip blog, asking her to comment on the rumors that she and Tony are soulmates, and to confirm whether she appears in the attached picture of the two of them.

Reluctantly, Darcy opens the attachment. It is, indeed, a picture of her and Tony at lunch in the cafeteria yesterday, holding hands across the table. 

And here she’d though they were flying under the radar by sticking to the Tower and not going out in public.

Darcy opens a few more emails. They’re mostly like the first one, requests for comments and interviews, offers of professional representation from talent agencies, offers of makeovers from stylists and clothing from designers. A handful are from Tony’s fans, and Darcy would _really_ like to know how they found her Gmail in less than 24 hours. About half of them were actually sweet, telling her that she and Tony were cute together and wishing them happiness. The other half called her a gold-digging slut, or words to that effect, and about ten of them were actually, when you got past the bad spelling and abuse of exclamation marks, death threats.

Darcy can remember thinking as a kid that it would be great to be famous. Now, she’s getting the sense that it _strongly_ depends on what you’re famous _for_.

She’s so far down the rabbit-hole of her inbox that when a hand comes to rest on her shoulder, she shrieks and falls right out of her chair. Tony catches her before she hits the ground, hauling her back to her feet by her elbow.

“Easy, Lewis.” He lets her go slowly. “You okay?”

Darcy swallows hard. “I am honestly not even sure.”

Now that she’s seeing him up close, she notices how harassed Tony looks. There’s anger and tension in the lines around his mouth and eyes, and when he looks at her, there’s more than a trace of fear in his expression. 

“You saw it, huh?” His tone is casual, but his right hand curls into a fist. He doesn’t even seem to notice.

“If by ‘it’ you mean a ton of extremely creepy emails from people who seem to know that we’re soulmates, yes, I saw it.” Darcy rubs her arm.

Tony’s eyes dart past her, towards her desk. The next thing Darcy knows, he’s lunging for her laptop.

“Hey!” Darcy intercepts him by hopping up onto the desk, putting her whole body between Tony and her computer. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’ve had enough privacy violation for one day without you snooping through my goddamn browser history.”

“What do you mean by creepy emails?” Tony demands. “Who are they from? Are you getting threats?”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to say something like “Define threat”, or even just, “no”. The thing is, though, she doesn’t like lying when she doesn’t have to, and anyway, the content of her emails is not as important as to her right now as clearing up this fun new issue with Tony.

“You need to, one, back up, and two, back off.” Her legs are dangling off the edge of the desk, and she’s strongly tempted to make her point by kneecapping him with the toe of her boot. “You don’t have an all-access pass to my business just because we’re soulmates.”

A muscle jumps in Tony’s jaw. “If you’re getting threats, I need to know about them.”

The way he says it is a little too flat, a little too controlled, and suddenly it hits Darcy that Tony is Iron Man. 

It wasn’t like she’d forgotten; half the work Bruce and Tony do together involves upgrades to the suit, and she’s met all the other Avengers at this point. She just hasn’t really had a chance to think about what that means for _her_ yet. 

Because, on the one hand, she’s butting heads with Tony, the hot, slightly fucked-up older guy that she sort of has a thing with now, and while that’s not an entirely comfortable feeling, she can hold her own, no problem. On the other, this is _Iron Man_ , and she’s his _soulmate_ , and when you put it like that, Tony’s question sounds a lot less like the innocent query of a worried and slightly overprotective sort-of boyfriend, and a lot more like a superhero asking her to name his next target.

Darcy is in no way ready for that kind of responsibility. Yes, she’s unsettled by the fact that she just found _death threats_ in her email, but she’s more resentful over being made to feel like she suddenly has to _protect_ those nuts from _Tony_.

Before she can figure out how to say any of that, Bruce comes over, and he seems to get that Darcy is completely overwhelmed. He doesn’t exactly shield Darcy with his body, but he steps up next to her so that he and Darcy are shoulder to shoulder. (Sitting on the desk makes her tall enough for that.)

“Darcy, I’m sure you can understand why Tony would be worried,” Bruce says. He puts a comforting hand on her shoulder, and Darcy droops slightly, leaning into her his touch. She can’t help but notice the way Tony’s eyes follow the movement, but she can’t help it if he’s jealous: she has a history with Bruce that she doesn’t have with Tony yet, and right now, that’s what she needs. 

Maybe she’ll get there with Tony eventually; she feels like she could. But he’s not going to make it happen faster by ordering her around and taking her stuff.

“I didn’t say you weren’t allowed to worry,” she grumbles, addressing Tony directly, because she’s not actually trying to make him feel left out. “I’m saying, you don’t get to go _around_ me just because you’re having _feelings_ all over the place.”

Tony’s expression softens slightly. He rubs a hand over his face and gestures broadly. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he mutters. “I wanted to keep this private. I just _found_ you; you shouldn’t be dealing with this crap right now.”

Darcy grimaces. “I know, right? I haven’t even hugged you yet, and strangers are already asking me what you’re like in bed.”

Bruce steps aside slightly, which is the only warning she gets before Tony strides forward and throws his arms around her. One of his hands cups the back of her head, and the other comes to rest between her shoulder blades. 

It’s awkward for a couple of seconds; then she lets her head rest against his shoulder and wraps her arms around his waist. Tony gives good hugs. It’s a nice quality for a soulmate to have.

“Look on the bright side,” she says. “At least I don’t have any family. This would be an awkward way for them to find out.”

Tony doesn’t laugh; he just holds her tighter. “I haven’t even told Pepper yet.”

“Oh, _man_.” Darcy pats his back. “It was nice knowing you, I guess.”

Tony pulls back slightly, until they’re face to face. “I promise not to hack your email or steal your computer if you promise to forward me the important messages.”

Darcy hesitates. “Are you gonna track the senders down?”

“I’ll let SHIELD handle it,” he says, and it sounds like a promise. “Unless they can’t. I’m not gonna…I just need to know you’re safe.” 

“Fine,” she grumbles.

Tony gives her a very quick smile. “Good. And I need you to move into the Tower.”

Darcy shoves Tony back; he doesn’t go very far. “That is a totally different conversation than the one we were just having!”

“It’s not, actually. Where you do live right now?”

Darcy opens her mouth. “I don’t think I want to tell you that.”

“Yeah, exactly. If it was safe, you’d just say so.”

“No one is threatening me at my apartment, Tony!”

“They will.” Tony’s mouth is hard. “And I’m not waiting until after someone attacks you to take your security seriously.”

Darcy goldfishes at him for a second. Then she turns to Bruce. “Help me out here,” she pleads.

Bruce gives Tony a long look. “I think whatever happens next has to be Darcy’s decision.” Then he adjusts his glasses and gives Darcy a wry smile. “That said, I’ve thought you would be better off living here for a long time now. I just didn’t want to pressure you into it. Also, it wasn’t technically it’s my place to invite you.”

“And as we established, until noon yesterday, I thought you lived here already. Otherwise I would have moved you in months ago.” Tony looks at her steadily. “This isn’t about you and me. We agreed to take this slowly; we still can. You’ll have your own place, doors coded to your biometrics. The only difference it’ll make is that your commute will get a lot easier.”

Darcy’s head is spinning, and she’s starting to get a headache. It isn’t that Tony, and Bruce, don’t have good points. It’s just that she’s starting to feel like her whole _thing_ with Tony is getting off on a seriously wrong foot, and she doesn’t know how to disentangle the very real issue of her newfound celebrity status and all the problems that come with it from…everything else.

“Bruce,” she says quietly, “Can you give us a second?”

“Yeah, of course.” Bruce gives her shoulder a parting pat and walks back over to his desk.

“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?” Tony smirks. “I’m always in trouble when girls need a second alone with me.”

“I’m not your mother,” she tells him. “I don’t really do lectures? This isn’t actually about you. It’s about me. And boundaries. Boundaries that did not magically disappear when we found out we were soulmates.”

“You can have all the boundaries you want, but as long as there are people who—”

“Stop.” Darcy jabs a finger in his face. “Listen. Okay? Right now, I am talking, and you are listening.”

Tony takes a step back and crosses his arms over his chest. He shrugs and waves a hand, inviting her to go on—albeit in the most dismissive way possible. Darcy is actually grateful; the fresh surge of irritation she feels makes it easier to use her words.

“There are two things going on here,” she tells him. “One of them involves crazy people who are way too interested in our personal lives. The other involves this thing we have, which is only like, 48 hours old. When I said we needed to ease into stuff? Yeah, I was talking about sex, which I know you get, so I’m not worried about that. But I was also talking about this. This caveman attitude you’ve got going on is making it _harder_ for me to make decisions that will keep me safe.”

Tony’s face is very pale, and Darcy can’t tell if it’s because he’s angry or because of…something else. But she can’t get sidetracked now.

“ _Maybe_ you have a point, and it would better if I moved in here. But as long as you’re making decisions for me and trying to bully me into going along with them, I can’t even think about that. I have to think about whether you’re always going to be like this, and whether I need to put my foot down now, just to make sure you understand that you can’t tell me what to do.”

Tony opens his mouth, and she can tell that it takes everything he’s got to shut it again without saying anything.

“I mean,” Darcy throws her hand in the air, “Did you even _think_ about just talking rationally with me? Did it ever cross your mind to just be like, ‘Hey Darcy, things just got seriously complicated in a way we totally were not prepared for, what do you think about moving in? Oh and by the way, if you start getting death threats, I can help you with those?’”

Tony’s eyes widen. “You’re getting death threats?” 

“Focus!” she shouts. “I need you to tell me you understand what I’m saying to you. Because, if you don’t? We have a problem. A big one.”

Tony scrubs at his eyes. “Can I talk now?”

“Yes, but I reserve the right to start yelling if you say something stupid.”

“This isn’t your world.” Tony looks right at her, and his gaze is so intense that it’s hard not to look away. “This is—I was born with these problems. Bodyguards, threats, journalists, all of it. But you weren’t. You had a normal life—mostly—and then this happened, and now you’re in the deep end, and there are like, riptides and sharks and things, and you don’t even understand how fast everything can go to shit. Not because you’re stupid or you can’t handle yourself; because this is new to you. And you got dragged into it because of me, so it’s on me to take care of things. You want to talk about this stuff, we can talk, but you have to be _safe_ while we’re talking, and I—”

“No,” says Darcy. She doesn’t shout. She’s proud of herself for that.

Tony grits his teeth. “What the fuck do you mean ‘no’?”

“No, I don’t have to be safe before you start talking to me. You have to talk to me _first_. Talking is _step one_.”

Tony stares at her. “Are you kidding me with this?”

“I am not even slightly in a joking mood right now. Okay, that’s a lie, I’m always in a joking mood. But I’m not joking about this.”

“So, what, you—” Tony laughs, sharp and incredulous. “If there’s a fire or something, I’m supposed to stop and ask permission before I pull you out of the room? Is that how this works in your head?”

“If there was a fire I would be running out of the room on my own. Or I would be unconscious, and sure, if I’m out of it, feel free to use your best judgement. But right now, I’m not unconscious, and nothing is on fire.”

“Matter of time. You think things aren’t on fire? You just wait.”

“Then I guess we’ll deal with that when it happens.” Darcy’s heart is pounding, and she doesn’t trust herself to keep being part of this conversation without hurling a pencil mug at Tony’s head, or crying or something. She gets down off the desk and picks up her laptop. “In the mean time, I have work to do.”

“Where do you think you’re going? Darcy—stop, would you just stop for a second?”

She’s not sure what sets her off; probably the combination of the anger in Tony’s voice, and the fact that it’s been ages since she had a fight like this, intimate and fraught, but her body remembers on a cellular level how those fights used to end for her. She doesn’t think Tony is trying to grab her, and even if he were she doesn’t think for a second he would hurt her. But he’s upset, and he’s following her while she’s trying to walk away, and when he darts around her to block her path, she reacts without thinking.

Her laptop clatters to the floor as she ducks her head and throws her hands up in front of her face to ward off a blow that isn’t coming.

The silence that fills the lab is heavy and thick like smoke.

When Darcy peeks through her fingers, Tony and Bruce are both staring at her.

Tony looks like someone just punched him in the stomach repeatedly. His face is white with a greenish cast, and his hands are hanging limp and helpless at his sides.

Bruce, by contrast, looks different than Darcy has ever seen him before. His shoulders are squared and his glasses are in his hand. He’s looking back and forth from her to Tony like he’s making up his mind about something.

“Tony,” he says, and his voice is quiet, but not hesitant in the slightest. “Take a walk.”

Tony spins to face him, and Darcy just knows that whatever he’s about to say is going to be incredibly ugly, and he won’t even really mean it, but it will probably ruin his and Bruce’s whole friendship.

But Bruce holds his gaze for a long moment, and eventually Darcy realizes that, whatever is going on between them, it’s not some kind of macho stand-off. It’s deeper than that, and it probably has something to do with the things Tony knows about Bruce’s past.

Tony walks out of the room fast, eyes straight ahead. Darcy stands there, looking at the empty door, while Bruce comes to stand next to her. He bends down to pick up her laptop, brushing off the clamshell. Then he sets it down on a table and turns to look at her, his gaze evaluative, doctorly.

“Are you okay?” he says.

Darcy just blinks at him.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shakes her head.

Bruce keeps looking at her for a second. Then he squeezes her arm briefly. “Do you want me to teach you how to make a really disgusting polymer out of guar gum and Borax?”

Darcy slumps against him in relief. “ _Please_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I probably won't be posting daily from this point--there are only a couple of chapters left and only one is totally complete, so it'll be a few days. Thanks so much for all your comments and kudos, they mean the world to me.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for additional warnings specific to this chapter.

Darcy doesn’t see Tony again for the rest of the day. She isn’t surprised, but it doesn’t really do anything for her concentration. She’s worried about him now, and worried about what he might do; the goal had been to get him to talk to her _more_ , not shut down communications completely. 

“I think I fucked things up,” she says to Bruce, poking her slime polymer despondently. 

“You didn’t fuck up,” says Bruce calmly. “You said exactly what you needed to say.”

“Yeah, and look how well that went.” 

Bruce shakes his head, scanning the problem set she finished for him after lunch. “Tony doesn’t really see himself the way we see him,” he says. “For being one of the 4 or 5 most powerful individuals in the world, he doesn’t feel like he’s really in control of anything. And he’s scared of losing you, so he feels like you have all the power in the relationship; he doesn’t understand how much it matters that he’s older and stronger and…all the rest of it.” Bruce looks up at her. “It wasn’t fair of him to push you that hard, but assuming you want a relationship with him, taking a stand now, at the beginning, is probably the best thing you could have done.”

Darcy groans and leans back in her chair. “I _like_ that he cares so much. I really do. I just…” She frowns. “Do you think I should go talk to him?”

“I think that depends on what you want to get out of it.”

“I don’t want him to feel bad.” She picks up a pencil and tries to stand it on its end. “He probably thinks I’m afraid of him.”

Bruce goes very quiet for a moment.

“What?” Darcy prods.

Bruce shakes his head. “I think maybe you were a little afraid of him,” he says.

“I wasn’t! It was just…”

“I know what it was,” says Bruce. “I can guess, at least. I know it wasn’t about Tony entirely. But it probably wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t pushed you into a corner. Metaphorically speaking, at least.”

Darcy puts her pencil down. It rolls across the desk towards the slime lump, which begins to absorb it.

“I don’t believe Tony would ever hurt you on purpose,” Bruce continues. “But something he did made you feel threatened on some level, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea to let him off the hook for that completely.”

Darcy watches the tip of Bruce’s pencil as it moves over her paper. “So I should wait for Tony to figure things out on his own? I feel like I could be waiting for awhile.”

“He might surprise you. He is a genius after all. In the mean time, I have a proposition.”

Darcy’s eyes widen. “Damn, Banner, I’d say you don’t let an opportunity slide, but there were those three months _before_ I found my soulmate.”

“Ha, ha.” Bruce hands her homework back to her. Darcy scans it; Bruce doesn’t believe in red pens, and his spiky, minuscule pencil notations are almost impossible to see, let alone read. Still, it looks like she did all right. “If it’s okay with you, I thought I could start picking you up in the mornings and giving you a lift home after work.”

Darcy frowns. “Didn’t you tell me that your license expired like, eight years ago?”

“I won’t be driving, just keeping you company,” he explains patiently. “If anyone’s going to bother you, it’ll probably be during your commute. You have roommates, right?”

She shudders. “So many roommates.”

“Right. So here at the Tower, and when you’re at home, you won’t be such an easy target. But taking the same bus every day makes your schedule too regular, too predictable for anyone who’s watching you.”

On the surface, Bruce seems like the Avenger least likely to have advice to offer on how to maneuver to avoid potential enemies. Even when Bruce has his fightin’ pants on, Hulk doesn’t really worry about things like “how to avoid being seen”. It always takes Darcy by surprise when she remembers how much of Bruce’s life was spent on the run, or fending off dangerous people.

Now that she thinks about it, Bruce probably knows a thing or two about being afraid of people you care about, too.

“You’re not worried that someone will attack us and you’ll Hulk out in the middle of rush hour traffic?” Darcy says, because the moment doesn’t need to get any heavier than it already is.

“Well,” he says, “I’m always worried about that. But Thor is on Asgard, Steve and Nat are in D.C. and Clint is on a mission. I didn’t think you’d let Tony do it.”

“Good point. Wait.” Darcy arches an eyebrow. “Was this Tony’s idea?”

Bruce laughs. “Tony’s idea was sending movers to your apartment while you were at work today and ambushing you at 6 o’clock with your new apartment in the Tower.”

Darcy straightens up slowly. “I take back everything I said. Let him stew. And yes, since you asked nicely, you can give me a lift.”

*

Things remain tense, both at home and at work, for the rest of the week. At home, Darcy has to deal with her roommates’ sudden, avid curiosity about her connection to the Avengers—she hadn’t bothered to mention where she worked before, but it turns out that the photo of her and Tony in the cafeteria was trending on Twitter by noon under the #TonyStarkSoulm8 hashtag, and even people who act like they’re above celebrity gossip get curious when the most notorious playboy in the world finds his supposed match. 

The busker, she strongly suspects, is going to sell an interview to a tabloid any day now, and he keeps trying to get Darcy to take selfies with him—which, hard pass. If he escalates to photographing her without permission, she’s going to seriously reconsider her position on letting Iron Man deal with him. Or else she’ll let Bruce walk her to her door some evening so he can drop a hint that non-consensual photography makes him very angry.

Darcy didn’t leave a ton of friends and family behind when she moved east, but a lot of people whose names are at best vaguely familiar to her are suddenly getting in touch, full of curiosity about her supposedly glamorous superhero-adjacent lifestyle, including a couple of second cousins she hasn’t talked to since their ages were in the single digits. Even one of her old professors emails her, expressing his hopes that Darcy is putting the lessons she learned in his international affairs class to good use, which is hilarious, because she’s fine with Thor and everything, but no one is going to be naming her Earth’s ambassador to Asgard anytime soon.

There is one person from her old life that Darcy halfway expects to get in touch, except it would also be totally like him to just sit in his room sulking over the fact that Darcy has finally found her soulmate, probably while cutting pictures out of the tabloids for his serial killer wall. She keeps a nervous eye on her inbox all week, and checks her spam filters every day, but nothing’s turned up so far. She’s keeping her promise about forwarding the scary emails to Tony, but she just hopes he’s keeping his end of the deal and staying out of her Gmail, because if that message does turn up, she doesn’t want Tony anywhere near it. She’s got her hands full with him as it is.

Speaking of Tony: in some ways, it’s like time has skipped back to the pre-Soulmate Revelation period of Darcy’s employment at the Tower. Tony sticks to his workshop; Bruce visits him there occasionally, but he mostly works on his own projects in the lab and continues helping Darcy with her chemistry and bio lessons. 

It isn’t that Darcy and Tony aren’t speaking to each other, but unless they’re going out of their way to create opportunities for interaction, their orbits just don’t collide very often. It’s four whole days after their fight before they even see each other, and that’s only because Darcy can’t stand it anymore and goes down to the workshop.

She’s thought long and hard about what Bruce said about not letting Tony off the hook, and she agrees with him—if it was important for her to draw a line in the sand and defend her boundaries, it’s equally important that she keep defending them, even when Tony gets his feelings hurt—but she can understand that Tony might be keeping his distance, not because he’s having a tantrum, but because he doesn’t understand exactly what he did to scare her, and is therefore afraid of doing it again. 

Darcy figures she can afford to help him with that much, at least. She can let him know where her sore spots are; after that, it’ll be on him to respect them. If this thing they have is going to work out—and she’s kind of surprised by how much she wants it to—she needs to give him that chance.

JARVIS lets her into the workshop without her having to ask, and without announcing her arrival. She doesn’t know if that’s because Tony has given her blanket access, or because JARVIS is using his independent judgment to look after what he sees as Tony’s best interests. She kind of hopes it’s the latter; all things considered, Pepper really isn’t the scariest friend Tony has, so it’s just as well if JARVIS perceives Darcy as being good for Tony.

“We have to stop not meeting like this,” she says, and Tony abruptly drops a large piece of primer colored sheet metal. It crashes into his workbench and takes a bunch of tools and canisters to the ground with it.

“Uh—it’s okay, you don’t have to—thanks.” Darcy has rushed over to help Tony pick up the pieces, and Tony is getting flustered, trying to shoo her away and accept her help at the same time. “Did you, uh, I mean, it’s nice to see you. How’s it, how are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” she tells him. “Little concerned that maybe you’ve been down here working on a way to upload your consciousness into the armor so you can be limitlessly powerful in its mechanical embrace.”

Tony’s eyes get _huge_. “What did Bruce tell you? Kidding, I’m kidding,” he says, when Darcy gapes at him. “I’m good, staying busy.”

“I noticed,” she says drily.

Tony winces a little. “Just trying to keep out of your business. How’s that going, by the way?”

“My business?”

“Sure.”

“Bruce taught me how to make slime out of Borax and guar gum the other day.”

“Hmm.” Tony dusts his hands off and gets back to his feet, and Darcy stands with him. “You should know that I’m trying really hard not to take it personally that you’re letting Bruce supervise your scientific education singlehandedly.”

“Dude, the whole thing was his idea. It’s not like you ever offered before. Besides, the stuff you do is…” Darcy waves her hand vaguely.

“What? Not good enough for you? Too grimy? Too explosive?” Tony’s expression is half challenge, half petulance.

“Way beyond where I am right now, Captain Insecurity,” she says, glaring at him. “I’m getting caught up on stuff that you probably mastered before you were toilet trained.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t have a healthy appreciation for experiments that demonstrate basic engineering principles,” he sniffs. “As long as you’re making slime polymers with Banner, there’s no reason you can’t be making pumpkin trebuchets or solar hot dog cookers or lemon batteries with moi.”

The part of Darcy that is still six years old and glued to a gigantic TV set watching Bill Nye explain simple machines jumps up and down, clapping her hands. Adult Darcy arches an eyebrow. “Gonna be pretty hard to do that and avoid me at the same time. You sure you’re up for it?”

Tony makes a face. “I wasn’t avoiding you.”

“You are lying to me with your face.”

“I wasn’t…” Tony rubs a hand over his chest. “I didn’t think you wanted to see me.”

Darcy nods soberly. “Yeah, when I said you needed to talk to me more? I meant you should actually stop talking to me altogether. It was perceptive of you to figure that out.”

The face Tony is making gets even more complicated.

Darcy heaves a sigh and sits down on the battered, singed sofa behind Tony’s workbench. “I thought maybe we could get away without talking about this. Bruce was under the impression that you were a genius or something and could figure things out on your own.”

“I _am_ a genius,” Tony points out. “In certain areas, I am _the_ genius.”

“And in other areas you maybe need a little extra help after class?”

Tony grunts. He clears a spot on his bench and picks up something metal and complicated looking, and starts tightening gears, Darcy is guessing, completely at random. He looks younger like this, she thinks; more himself. She remembers what Bruce had said about Tony feeling like he wasn’t in control of anything. Here in his workshop, surrounded by intelligent robots and fantastic machinery of his own creation, he looks completely in control, to the point that he probably doesn’t even think there’s anything remarkable about that.

This may or may not be the best time for them to have this conversation, but Darcy thinks that, for Tony at least, this is probably the best _place_ they could have it.

“So, I don’t tell people this story very often,” she says. “Actually, the only person I’ve ever told it to is Jane, bless her heart, and I think she forgot everything about ten minutes afterwards. But she hired me during those ten minutes, so it worked out okay for me.”

Tony glances up from his gear-tightening. “What story?”

“Tragic Backstory Hour with Darcy Lewis,” she says. “I figure when I’m in my 60’s I’ll write a screenplay and sell it to Lifetime. The girl who plays me will win an Emmy and it’ll launch her career. I won’t even be envious at that point, because I’ll have moved gracefully into stately middle age.”

Tony looks a little less distracted by her jokes than she intended him to be. “You already told me about your mom dying, how much more tragedy are you going for?” Then he stops abruptly, narrowing his eyes at her. “Wait. Is this about the guy who lied about having your Words?”

“Wow,” says Darcy, trying to ignore the way her stomach twists. “I am legit impressed, you have some serious deductive reasoning chops.”

Tony stops pretending to be engrossed by the device in his hands and looks at her for a long, long moment. He’s obviously building up to something, so she waits it out.

“Are you about to tell me that he’s the reason you have the flinch reflexes of a three-tour combat veteran?” His expression is blank and hard at the same time.

Darcy’s breath escapes her with a whoosh. “Okay, I take it back; you’re definitely a genius.”

Tony stares at her. Then, deliberately, he puts the gear mechanism and the lubricant spray on the floor at his feet. He turns to face her fully, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Tell me,” he says.

Having the complete attention of Tony Stark feels a little like finding herself onstage under bright, hot lights with an entire audience full of people staring at her, except that the power of all those gazes, all those thoughts, are concentrated in a single brain and pair of eyes. Darcy doesn’t even _try_ to look at him while she talks.

“So like, the thing I could never figure out about him was, why was he so afraid I was going to leave him?” She’s impressed with how casual she manages to sound, like she’s talking about someone else’s relationship. “Because he was _so_ insecure about that, from day one. I just chalked it up to the missing finger thing at first, like, of course that’s gonna give you issues of some kind, losing your soulmark like that. But I was _so_ into us being soulmates. I was the complete Disney cliche, hearts in my eyes, little birdies flying around my head. It just felt like destiny, you know? My mom had just died, and I didn’t have any friends, and then he was _there_ , like it was meant to be.”

Tony keeps quiet. Darcy is glad she decided to wear a skirt that day; pleating the hem between her fingers gives her something to do with her hands while she’s avoiding Tony’s eyes.

“Things were sort of okay at first,” she continues. “He was needy, I wanted to feel needed. Perfect match, basically? I figured he’d chill out once he realized I wasn’t going anywhere, but it just got worse the longer we were together. I ended up moving in with him just to prove that I was committed, even though my scholarship covered the cost of my dorm room and I really couldn’t afford my own place. But once we were living together…things got real, pretty much overnight. Next thing I knew, I was going, ‘If this guy was _anybody_ except my soulmate, I would be _so_ out of here.’” Darcy’s voice catches. “But I figured things would have to get better eventually. I mean, there had to be a reason we had each other’s Words, right?”

She trails off for a moment, searching for the words that will carry her over the hump. But then Tony helps her out. “How’d you figure out he was lying?”

Darcy rubs her arm. She knows that she does that a lot; people have commented on it before. Most of the time she doesn’t even notice. It’s like how Bruce runs his thumbs over the back of his hands, and Tony scratches at his chest. They all have their little tells.

“I woke up one night,” she says, “and he was—”

She freezes. The silence goes on for so long that Tony sits up straight. “If you don’t want to do this now, you don’t have to. ”

The thing is, she does. If she walks out of here and leaves the story half told, knowing how Tony’s mind works, knowing all the questions he’ll be trying to answer on his own, the anxiety will sit in her stomach like a boulder.

Suddenly she remembers sitting with Bruce in the stairwell, his voice saying, _He’s very smart; he can fill in the blanks._

“I think, actually—can I just show you my soulmark now?” she says, hearing the tremor in her voice.

Tony stands up so quickly she almost startles. He comes to sit next to her on the couch, and having him close by helps, way more than Darcy would have predicted. They’re not even touching, but the warmth of his body lifts the chill in the air around them.

Darcy reaches out and puts her hand in his. Tony closes his hand around hers automatically; with her other hand, she tugs the sleeve of her shirt up past her elbow.

The scar that used to be her soulmark is eight years old now. It’s about one inch wide and four inches long, tracing the big vein that runs down from her wrist. 

It isn’t possible to obliterate a soulmark completely, unless you remove the whole body part. Despite the thick, ropy scar tissue that grew back over it when the burn healed, you can still see the faint black smudge that used to spell out _hey kiddo where have you been my whole life._

Moving away from the desert had been a smart move for Darcy, wardrobe wise, because she doesn’t have any shirts that aren’t long-sleeved anymore. The scar makes people in general really uncomfortable, because it’s impossible to mistake for anything other than what it is. 

Darcy’s imagination has always shied away from picturing how her actual soulmate might take it when she finally had to show them what was left of their Words. She never knew what she was hoping for, reaction-wise. Disgust would be bad; getting angry with her would be bad; total indifference would be bad too. She couldn’t even put herself in her soulmate’s shoes and try to imagine how she would feel if it had happened to them, because the fact that it had happened to _her_ completely changed her perspective on things. Darcy doesn’t really have the capacity to be shocked by cruelty between soulmates anymore, and she knows that shock is the biggest part of most people’s response.

If it had happened to her soulmate, she would be sympathetic, and patient, and protective—that’s how she feels about Tony and all the people who have tried to trick him, after all—but she wouldn’t really be _surprised_.

Looking at Tony as he looks at her arm, she still doesn’t have any idea how she wants him to react. So she just waits, and studies him.

Tony’s grip on her hand is tight. His other hand hovers over her arm, fingertips not quite touching the dead tissue. The, with his forefinger, he traces the unmarred skin in a line just beneath the mottled edge of the scar, and goose flesh races up the length of Darcy’s arm.

“Neat borders,” he says, and he sounds clinical, thoughtful. “Were you drugged? Can’t see you holding still for this.”

“Asleep,” she says. “Though I did have some wine before bed, so I guess I was sleeping a little heavier than usual? It was mostly over by the time my arm started hurting enough to wake me up.”

“Mostly?” says Tony. He doesn’t look up at her.

Darcy shrugs. “I actually didn’t even look at my arm right away? Like, I didn’t feel it at first. I woke up and he was…standing over me, so I turned the lamp on, and… I’d never seen him shirtless before. Somehow he managed to just never…but he was shirtless when I turned the light on, and as soon as I could see, his Words were like, right there. In my face. And they weren’t mine, and all of a sudden, I got it. It all made sense. He wasn’t my soulmate. He was just a mean, manipulative, lying scumbag that I’d wasted two years of my life on.”

Tony swallows. She watches the notch of his throat bob, looks down at his eyelashes as he keeps his head bent to stare at her wrist. 

“At first I thought that he was trying to keep me from leaving him,” she says, almost unable to be quiet now that she’s finally talking about it. “Like maybe he thought that I wouldn’t even try to find my real soulmate if I didn’t have a soulmark anymore. But I grabbed my purse and my laptop and walked out of there and he didn’t even try to stop me. How weird is that?” She tries to laugh, and it comes out sounding kind of strangled. “But yeah, I got in the car and I just drove, and eventually I looked down at my arm and…I don’t even know what I was feeling. My brain was just this big speech bubble with an ellipsis. I didn’t cry or anything until I got to the hospital, and that was just because of how the nurses kept looking at me. Like, if I’d walked into the emergency room with my face burned beyond recognition. That was how they looked at me.”

She doesn’t even realize that her left hand is shaking until Tony grabs that one too. His hand spasms around her fingers, a seemingly involuntary movement.

“So anyway.” Darcy sighs. “That’s it. That’s Tragic Backstory Hour. You officially know all my secrets. I guess that means I trust you or something.”

Tony has a really emotive face for someone who just gets quieter and more expressionless the more intensely he feels something. Actually, that’s probably why it’s fairly easy to tell when he’s processing something big: his face becomes such a blank canvas that all his little tells, like the muscle that twitches in his jaw, and the lines that stand out around his eyes and mouth, are more prominent. 

The problem is that, on Tony, anger and sorrow and tension and confusion all get funneled down to the same set of microexpressions, so even though Darcy can always tell when he’s having a moment, she can never tell where it’s going to lead. Under different circumstances she would probably be backing off a little, giving him some time with his thoughts.

But he’s still holding onto both of her hands, and he doesn’t look like he’s prepared to let her go any time soon.

Darcy waits, and waits, and finally she says, “Losing the feeling in my fingers, dude.”

Tony exhales loudly through his nose. He doesn’t release her entirely, but he starts rubbing the circulation back into her hands. 

“Quick question,” says Darcy, “is this the longest you’ve ever gone without talking? ‘Cause it seems like it could be. Since normally you talk a lot.”

Tony snorts, and just like that, the mood shifts. He keeps rubbing her hands, but the silence is lighter, less portentous. When he speaks at last, his voice is gruff.

“Don’t really know what to say. Usually when I feel like this, I’m in the suit and I can express myself by blowing shit up.” His nostrils flare. “Trying to figure out what to do with the fact that you said that you trust me, because you seem like an intelligent person, and that decision flies in the face of all reasonable evidence so far.”

“Tony.” Darcy wishes he would look at her.

His mouth is a white slash, and Darcy is grateful to him for spiking what was sure to be a very impressive litany of self-blame and guilty feelings. She’s still a little raw and she doesn’t have the emotional fortitude to make him feel better about himself right now.

“Tell me I haven’t hurt you,” he says, and Darcy realizes the relief was premature. “Tell me that since the day I first saw you in the lab I haven’t said and done the worst possible thing every chance I got.”

“Yeah, no.” Darcy shakes her head. “There is no good way to answer that question. I’m just gonna sit here. Let me know when the Guilty Feelings Express pulls into Moving the Fuck On Station.”

Tony winces and rubs his forehead.

“You aren’t doing that bad honestly,” she says, patting his knee companionably. “At least you didn’t tell me I was stupid for not knowing better than to think C—that guy was my soulmate.”

“People said that to you?” he demands, incredulous.

“ _So_ many people. I mean they were usually a little nicer about it, but yeah, basically everyone thinks you should have some kind of sixth sense for soulmate shit.” 

“Jesus Christ.” Tony rubs his head some more; Darcy wonders if she’s given him a headache. “Okay. Just tell me this. He’s dead now, right?”

“What?” 

“The guy whose name, don’t think I haven’t noticed, you’ve been very careful not to say, except that it starts with a C or a K,” says Tony. “I mean, he must be dead. I presume you just left out the part of the story where you went back and ran him down in the driveway or something.”

“That sounds like another question to which there is no good answer.”

Tony’s mouth remains tight and humorless, but Darcy isn’t having this fight again, if for no other reason than because there is a part of her that wants to lose it. Tony getting all Avenger-y over the randos in her email, not that appealing. Tony laying a righteous smackdown on the guy who erased his Words from her body—Darcy could get some serious catharsis out of that, which means it’s an impulse she needs to steer clear of.

“I did get a taser afterwards, if that makes you feel any better,” she adds.

Tony laughs, like it’s been surprised out of him. Then Darcy is looking up at him, and Tony is looking down at her, and the next thing she knows Tony is carefully removing her glasses. Then his hands are tangling in her hair, and she thinks that, while technically she would prefer if he asked asked if it was ok before kissing her, she can make allowance for him being largely nonverbal at the moment.

Except, instead of kissing her, he pulls her into his arms and tucks her head under his chin, and somehow that’s about a million times better. Especially when his hand starts rubbing circles on her back, and he sighs explosively into her hair. (It tickles.)

Darcy actually thought she was doing pretty well, getting all the way through the conversation without crying or freezing in a way she couldn’t recover from. It isn’t until Tony is surrounding her completely that she realizes how exposed and fragile she actually feels. She relaxes, gratefully, bonelessly against him, and Tony’s arms tighten around her in a way that makes her think he’s doing this for himself as much as he’s doing it for her.

“Can I make you a suit?” he says.

Darcy wants to pat him on the head for asking first; he’s growing up so fast. “If you do I’m just going to call myself Iron Maiden.”

Tony shudders. “Never mind. Can I upgrade your taser, at least?”

Darcy smiles against his shoulder. “Just don’t put JARVIS inside it. That would be weird, and I’d end up pretending he was Genie from Aladdin and trying to wish him free.”

“If you’re Aladdin, does that make me Jasmine?”

“I have no doubt that you could rock a crop top and harem pants, but if you get a tiger, I’m calling the SPCA.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings in this chapter for descriptions of physical and emotional abuse in the context of a romantic relationship.
> 
> So this is the last of the daily postings as I've officially posted all of the pre-written material. We'll be going at the pace of my actual writing now. Be merciful. And please keep the comments rolling--they mean so much to me, and I absolutely love answering questions about how the characters are thinking and all that sort of thing, so lay 'em on me.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I did manage to write a whole chapter yesterday. But that cannot happen every day so don't get your hopes up!

When the car arrives to pick Darcy up for work the next day, it has magically transformed into a limo, and Tony is waiting outside of it to open the door for her.

“Don’t kill me,” he says.

Darcy looks him up and down. For the first time since she’s known him, Tony is wearing a suit and tie—charcoal and maroon, with dark blue accents. He looks crazy hot. Like, cover of GQ hot. But she thinks she might like him better in the threadbare t-shirts and stained jeans he wears around the workshop.

Dressed like this, standing next to an _actual_ limo, Tony doesn’t look like anyone who could possibly be _hers_. She doesn’t even dare hug him in this state. What if she leaves wrinkles all over his designer threads and when he runs into his fellow billionaires he has to his explain that his soulmate is a total plebe who doesn’t understand the care of bespoke tailoring?

“I made a point of not telling you where I lived,” Darcy announces from the sidewalk, crossing her arms. The limo is mostly in the middle of the road and she knows she’s going to get into it, if only to avoid making a scene for her neighbors, but if she can’t hug Tony, she’s just going to have to give him grief for something. “If I were a suspicious person, I might think this was your way of finding out my address over my objections.”

“Okay, one, the driver works for me, so I could have got that information at any time. Two, if I were going to use that knowledge for devious purposes, I wouldn’t flaunt my intentions by showing up in person.” Tony removes his ludicrous sunglasses—it’s November, the skies are overcast, and it isn’t like they make him _less_ recognizable—and opens the door for her. 

“No funny business,” he promises. “Today, I’m just the footman.”

Saying goodbye to Tony last night had been really difficult. Darcy hadn’t wanted to leave; they’d talked for ages, mostly with Darcy slumped all boneless against his chest, and Tony trailing fingertips over her arms and petting her hair. She knew he hadn’t wanted her to leave, either. He’d been good about it—hadn’t try to guilt her into staying—but she could tell he was exercising a lot of self-control just by letting her walk down to the lobby to meet Bruce and their driver. 

She’s not sure what Tony would have done if she hadn’t already agreed to let Bruce see her home that evening. Something tells her he would have been a lot less pulled together if she’d tried leaving him to catch the 8:30 bus or whatever.

So while Tony Stark appearing in front of her building with a limo isn’t exactly helping Darcy maintain the low-profile, paparazzi-free existence she hadn’t realized was important to her until after she became an unwilling celebrity, Tony showing up on her doorstep at 7 a.m. because it was the next best thing to waking up next to her is sort of heart-melting. Which is why she lets him hand her into the limo, despite the fact that she’s wearing her normal uniform of jeans and boots and doesn’t really need the assist. 

“He promised to behave,” Bruce says, as she slides into the center seat. He hands her a Starbucks cup. “But I got your usual bribe just in case.”

“Bruce. You’re here.” She takes the coffee, blinking. “Wait. Why are you _both_ here? Did something happen? Are we in danger? Oh my god, why didn’t you text me—”

Tony plucks the coffee from her fingers and puts it in a cupholder, then grabs her hand and presses it to his lips. Darcy blushes on reflex, and Bruce politely averts his eyes. 

“Tony is here because this is an extra hour in your day that Tony can spend with you,” he says reassuringly. “And Bruce is here because he moonlights as my 70 year old aunt whose sole joy in life is cockblocking me.”

“Actually, Bruce is here because he was already in the car when Tony came pelting into the garage like his hair was on fire,” says Bruce. “And to a lesser extent, because he makes jokes like that.”

“Wasn’t a joke. You’re like two grey streaks away from being an exact duplicate of my great-aunt Graziella. It’s unnerving. I keep expecting you to offer me cannoli then make a crack about the size of my ass.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your ass,” says Darcy, feeling like a playground monitor. “But Bruce was referring to the fact that cockblocking jokes are not okay. Weren’t you, Bruce?”

Bruce reaches for the tablet lying in the seat beside him. “Sounds to me like you’ve got this covered, so I’m just going to catch up on my reading.”

“Wait, what did I say?” Tony’s expression is a cross between irritation, concern, and bafflement. “Am I not allowed to want private time with my soulmate? I know my committed-relationship-to-meaningless-fling ratio is a little off-balance, but I was under the impression that sort of thing was not only permitted, but encouraged.”

He hasn’t let go of her hand yet, and he gives her fingers a squeeze, like he’s genuinely looking for reassurance on this point.

“Private time is fine,” she says, squeezing back. “Just, in the future, leave your cock out of it.” 

Tony’s forehead wrinkles, like he’s only getting more confused. “You mean leave it at home? Because I do have the detachable kind, but I didn’t bring—”

“Okay! Cockblocking, as a concept, suggests that my male friends, like Bruce, control when you have access to my body, which is gross, because _I’m_ the only person who controls that, and now that you have your explanation we are going to stop talking about this immediately, because Bruce is changing colors, and _what if_ he gets big and _red_ if you make him embarrassed enough, Tony? What? If?” 

Darcy punctuates the end of this sentence by poking Tony in the chest twice with her free hand. 

Beside her, Bruce shifts. “If it helps, if getting embarrassed made me Hulk out, we’d all know it by now.”

“We wouldn’t like him when he’s socially awkward?” Tony makes a tiny, high-pitched noise deep in his throat, suggestive of either intense suffering or profound joy.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Darcy reaches over and fluffs Bruce’s hair. He closes his eyes reflexively. “He’s always socially awkward. We love him anyway.”

“I liked this conversation better when it was about Tony’s inappropriate sense of humor.”

“And I’m trying not to feel jealous of the fact that Banner rates the hair-petting treatment when all I have to show for dragging my ass out of bed at the crack of dawn is a lecture.”

“Is that what I missed out on, not having siblings?” Darcy wonders out loud. 

The awkward silence radiating from both Tony and Bruce doesn’t quite last until they get to the Tower, but it comes close enough.

*

It turns out that Tony is scheduled for an entire day of meetings at Stark Industries R&D, which makes Darcy even more appreciative of his coming to pick her up that morning. She probably won’t get another chance to see him before the end of the day.

At the lab, Darcy finishes her actual paid work in short order without Tony hanging around to distract her, and she spends the rest of the afternoon sitting at a table not far from Bruce’s workstation, going over a chapter in her chemistry book. 

At one point, she looks up and notices Bruce frowning at her distractedly. 

“What’s up?” she says. “Sorry I’m not further along with this, I’ve been a little preoccupied the last couple of days.”

“What? No, you’re fine.” He blushes slightly. “I didn’t mean to stare, I just…you’re wearing short sleeves.”

Darcy beams, pleased that he took notice. “I am.” She’d made a special shopping trip last night after work just to get three new shirts. Granted, it was winter, so the selection of short-sleeved blouses were limited, but she’d stocked up on a few t-shirts for good measure. It was a celebration of sorts; a sign to herself that she was moving on.

“And am I imagining things, or do you normally not…”

“I’ve never worn short sleeves to the lab before, no.”

“Ah.” Bruce looks pleased, and then confused, so Darcy takes pity on him.

“I showed Tony my soulmark yesterday,” she says. “After that, there wasn’t much point in hiding anymore.”

“Oh!” Bruce walks over to her table and sits down on the corner. “That’s wonderful. I mean, I assume that it went well.”

“It was good, yeah. Heavy, but you were right. He’s a good guy.”

“I’m really glad,” he says, and she can tell that he means it. She can also tell that, while he’s trying very hard not to stare at her arms, scientific curiosity is getting the better of him. Which is only to be expected, she tells herself; he knew about the fake soulmate thing, but she’d never explained in so many words that her soulmark was a scar or how it got that way.

“You can look,” she says. “I don’t mind.”

Bruce’s head pops up, and she sees guilt and denial crowding to the edge of his thoughts, so she scoots a little closer to him and extends her right arm. Bruce hesitates, but then he reaches down and pulls her arm towards him. She can tell that he’s clicked over into doctor-mode—that’s the only time he ever touches people with complete confidence.

She can tell the instant that his eyes come to settle on the scar. He goes very still, not unlike Tony had done last night, and she suspects that, just like Tony, Bruce’s giant brain is identifying the type of injury he’s looking at, estimating how long ago she got it, making deductions about the instrument or weapon that was used—in other words, using scientific analysis as a handy tool to shield himself from the real-world ugliness the scar represents. Since she doesn’t really _need_ a second round of confessions and hugs at the moment, she’s just as happy to let him keep his emotional distance.

“You were right about Tony being able to fill in the blanks,” she tells him. “So now I feel sort of stupid for not just letting him see it right away. Kind of like I made a big deal over nothing.”

“Over nothing,” says Bruce, his tone flat.

“Well, we probably could have avoided a lot of drama, at least. But it worked out okay in the end.” Darcy studies the nails of her left hand—the polish is chipping, but she’s strictly on a home-manicure budget, and she just hasn’t had the time to deal lately. 

When it’s been a few seconds, and Bruce still hasn’t let go of her arm, Darcy looks up. Bruce’s expression is completely frozen, and, on second thought, she _might_ have over-estimated just how much clinical distance Bruce is capable of.

He and Tony have a lot in common, but they aren’t the same. For instance, Tony’s father hadn’t murdered his mother when he was a child.

“Hey.” Darcy nudges Bruce’s leg with the toe of her shoe, trying to break the spell. “What’s up?”

Bruce is breathing slowly. Artificially slowly, like he’s trying to lower his heart rate. His grip on her arm is a little tighter than it needs to be, and his eyes are riveted to the scar like he can’t look away.

“He did this to you,” Bruce says, his voice dropping to a low register she’s never heard from him before. “The guy who lied about being your soulmate.”

“Um. Yeah.” Maybe Darcy should try the breathing thing, because _her_ heart rate is starting to kick up a little.

“You didn’t say.” Bruce’s shoulders rise and fall under his oversized lab coat. “I thought you were just being shy. You didn’t tell me that he _hurt_ you.”

“I’m sorry?” Darcy sort of wants him to let go so she can hug him or something, or possibly leave the room. “It didn’t seem that important at the time.”

“Not _important_?”

Something is definitely wrong. This isn’t like Bruce at all—he’s the last person who would ever to pressure her into talking about things she wasn’t ready to talk about, or yell at her for keeping things to herself.

“Bruce,” she says carefully. “Squeezing my arm pretty tight there, buddy.”

Bruce drops her arm like it’s red hot, and for a second she’s relieved; Bruce is obviously still in control. But then he hurls himself backwards, staggering away from the table. He covers his face with his hands, and his whole body folds double, like he has an agonizing stomach ache.

“Oh my god.” Darcy stands up, takes a step towards him, before freezing. “Bruce, no—it’s okay, everything’s okay, I promise, we’re safe here, I’m fine—”

The words die in her throat as Bruce braces himself against the wall and turns his face towards hers.

His eyes, normally mild and brown, are flashing vivid, radioactive green.

This is wrong, she thinks; Bruce shouldn’t be losing control because of _her_ , not when he’s been safe here, calm, protected from all the people who used to chase him and hurt him. She should have known better; she should have guessed, at least, that—

“ _Go_ ,” Bruce pants. He slams his fist into the wall, and she shrieks, then claps her hands over her mouth. “ _Get out_.”

Darcy hesitates, because part of her can’t get around the mental block that says _Bruce is safe, he would never hurt me_. And he looks awful like this, so helpless, like he’s in pain.

Then Bruce roars, and the sound is inhuman, anguished. She springs to her feet as Bruce collapses onto his hands and knees. 

She’s halfway to the door when she hears the sound of fabric tearing.

Suddenly, all the lights in the room are extinguished, replaced by a bright red glow. Darcy recognizes the signal: emergency protocols have been activated, cutting the lines to the oxygen tanks and other volatile explosive chemicals and gases that feed into the lab. The windows go dark, as adamantium shields snap into place.

She’s less than a yard from the exit when it too goes dark, hydraulics hissing as the adamantium blast door slams down. Darcy runs into it full speed, unable to stop herself. The metal absorbs the impact of her body without a shudder, and behind her, another roar, twice as loud as the first one, fills the room.

Darcy allows herself exactly five second to panic over the fact that she’s just been sealed into a room with the Hulk. Then she throws herself to the floor and crawls until she reaches her desk. It doesn’t offer a lot of shelter, but it’s better than nothing. She pulls her knees up to her chest and covers her head with her arms. She can’t help it; it’s just instinct. 

Her limbs—her whole body, really—have a mind of their own in the face of overwhelming terror. But her actual brain—the parts of it that aren’t repeating _oh shit_ on loop, like some kind of calming mantra—is accessing the memory of a conversation she had with Natasha Romanoff about two weeks after she moved into the Tower.

*

Darcy doesn’t see as much of the other Avengers as the tabloids are currently having a field day supposing. ( _Orgies in Stark Tower??_ reads one particularly over-the-top headline on a magazine the busker had pointedly left lying on the kitchen counter this morning.) Clint and Natasha and Steve have real jobs that keep them busy between team missions, and though they all have living quarters in the Tower, they spend most of their time elsewhere. But she has met them all, and Natasha, in particular, had been around for a few days not long after Darcy and Jane came to Manhattan. She’d turned up in the lab one afternoon when Jane and Bruce were both away at a conference and pulled up a chair next to Darcy’s desk.

“So I hear you’re working with Bruce,” she’d said, smiling in a way that struck Darcy as both friendly and completely unreadable.

“I work for Jane,” Darcy pointed out, because at that point, she still did. “But sure. I help Bruce out sometimes.”

“That doesn’t make you nervous?”

Darcy had blinked at her. “Does Bruce make me nervous? Um, I won’t ask if you’ve _met_ Bruce, because you obviously have, but…”

“Don’t play dumb.” Natasha didn’t stop smiling, but her eyes were serious. “You know exactly why most sane people would think twice before setting foot in the same room as him.”

“I didn’t say I hadn’t thought about it.” Darcy shrugged. “Everyone says he’s got it under control. And, admittedly I just met the guy, but he doesn’t seem like he’d be selfish enough to put people in danger if he was on some kind of hair trigger.”

Natasha had stopped smiling at that point, but it didn’t feel like she was being less friendly; if anything Darcy felt like she’d passed some kind of test. “All of that is true,” she said. “Bruce has the best self-control of any man I’ve ever known. And he needs to be with people who aren’t afraid of him. But he’s like anyone else; he has vulnerabilities. There’s no guarantee that he won’t transform around you at some point.”

“Okay, granted. But like, there’s no guarantee that _I_ won’t lose my shit and burn the lab down around us all after Jane insists, for the fifth time in a week, that showers are a luxury and not a necessity. Life’s a gamble, you dig?”

Natasha stared at her for a good five seconds, and Darcy knew that starting a game of eyeball chicken with an assassin was maybe not the smartest thing she’d ever done, but frankly, she has an excellent resting bitch face, and Natasha struck her as the kind of woman who would respect another woman for not backing down, even if Darcy wasn’t 100% sure what hill, exactly, she was trying to die on here.

“I like you,” Natasha said finally. “And I think you can be trusted with the information I’m about to give you. I’m not having this conversation with Foster, so if you’re not comfortable keeping secrets from her—”

“I am totally comfortable keeping secrets from Jane. Like, her social security number? That is information I possess that she does not.”

“Good.” Natasha smirked. “Like I said. There are a lot of things that can potentially bring the Hulk into play. Bruce is on top of most of them. But you need to know that Bruce’s transformations can be provoked by external factors. If someone shoots him, for instance, or he’s caught in an explosion, or his life is threatened in any way, he will transform and he won’t be able to control it.”

Darcy glanced around the lab, making a mental tally of all the potentially explosive substances it contained. “No offering him a diet-Coke-and-Mentos cocktail, got it.”

“The other thing you need to know is that even though Bruce is normally in control of his emotions, he has triggers. He has a long history of being a victim of violent trauma, starting from early childhood. I’m sure you know enough about post-traumatic stress disorder to understand how triggers can temporarily override conscious function.”

Something about the way Natasha said that made Darcy suspect that she knew things about her that weren’t exactly in her SHIELD file. “Do you know what those triggers are?”

“Not all of them, and I don’t think he does either. But if you want to play it safe, steer clear of topics related to child abuse, alcoholism, domestic abuse, spousal murder, and the U.S. army.”

Darcy blinked at her. “Well, there go all my casual conversational ice-breakers.”

A smile flickered at the corner of Natasha’s mouth. 

“You’re a smart woman, so I don’t need to tell you that if Bruce says to run, you run. Don’t argue with him, don’t ask questions. But.” Natasha leaned back in her chair slightly. “You might find yourself in a situation where escape isn’t possible. Under those circumstances—and only as a last resort—there’s something you can try that _might_ help.”

“I am totally invested in this conversation,” Darcy promised her. “Hit me.”

“In the field, the team is experimenting with a protocol to trigger counter-transformations. The idea is that as long as Hulk is around people he knows he can trust, he’ll accept it if they tell him that it’s safe to let Bruce take over again.” Natasha glared at her—not like Darcy had done something wrong, but like she wanted to be certain she had Darcy’s full attention. “I have no idea if it will work for you. Hulk has had a couple of years to get to know his teammates. You’re likable and nonthreatening and Bruce is already inclined to be fond of you, but I don’t know if it will be enough. You need to take that into consideration if you decide to try talking to Hulk.”

“Last resort, I get it,” Darcy said. “If I can run or hide, I’m totally going to run or hide.”

Natasha nodded. “In the field, we get the best results when I’m the one who runs the protocol. When the guys try it, it’s unpredictable. Any guesses why?”

Darcy knew she was being tested again. “It’s totally because you’re a chick, right?”

Natasha waited.

“I mean, what you said about Bruce’s trauma or whatever…that had to be his dad, right? Sounds like he was a mean, angry drunk who smacked little Bruce around and killed his mom.” Darcy felt sick just thinking about it; she sort of wanted to find Bruce and hug him, which, she realized, was totally not the point Natasha was trying to make here. “And the Hulk is all about those deep, primal emotions, so he probably sees men as threats and women as the ones who get threatened. Can’t ask a dude who’s all sub-verbal to be enlightened about things like that.”

Natasha smiled. “And that’s why I’m having this conversation with you and not Foster. Good thinking, Lewis. I’m going to go over the protocol with you now, but remember: run if you can run. Hide for as long as you can hide. Don’t try to pull Bruce back from the brink of a transformation; we’ve only tested that once and the results were not encouraging.”

“Got it, chief.” Darcy saluted. “Lay it on me.”

*

Darcy isn’t sure exactly how long she spends cowering under the desk. Her internal clock has a busted spring or whatever. At the moment, she’s not much more than a set of ears, primed for sounds of smashing.

The thing is, there hasn’t really _been_ a lot of smashing. Not yet at least. She’s heard one horrible metallic screech that suggests the work table she was sitting at earlier is no longer bolted to the floor, but mostly what she hears is Hulk’s loud, heavy breathing, and the occasional roar, which, she’s starting to suspect that Hulk just likes the sound of his own voice.

Occasionally she hears a lesser crash, like Hulk is bumping into things over by the crowded maze of workbenches and tables, and really, who can blame him for that. She just hopes he stays clear of the hood.

Then she hears heavy, shuffling footsteps headed for her side of the room, and Darcy is deeply grateful that she’d already taken her post-coffee consumption bathroom break, because if she’s about to die, she’d much rather die not smelling of pee.

When she can’t stand it anymore, she opens her eyes. It takes her vision a second to adjust to the weird red light suffusing the room, but only a second; all things considered, she goes from being nearly blind to seeing two trunk-like green legs standing next to her desk way too quickly. Darcy’s never been a screamer, but she does squeak, a high-pitched, animal noise of pure terror that is quickly drowned out by the Hulk’s answering roar.

Darcy covers her head again, but she can feel the air rushing in around her where the desk used to be, and she can hear the enormous crash the desk makes when Hulk throws it across the room a second later. She’s in the open now, completely exposed, and she fully expects that the next thing she’ll feel is all her bones breaking at once when Hulk’s huge green fist pounds her into squishy red nothingness.

But that doesn’t happen. Darcy is starting to wonder if she’s finally tapped into some latent mutant ability and made herself invisible, like in that one episode of Buffy, when she feels a gust of hot air blowing her hair back off her shoulders. Hesitantly, she opens one eye, peering from behind her hands.

Hulk is kneeling on the ground next to her. Not roaring, not smashing. Just looking, and breathing.

Darcy stares at him from behind the paltry shelter of her own arms until her hindbrain catches on to the fact that movement of any kind won’t necessarily result in her immediate death. Then, slowly, she uncurls a little, slumping against the wall and looking up at Hulk through her hair.

“You’re not gonna hurt me, right?” she says.

Hulk huffs, like the question annoys him, and Darcy takes a moment to be grateful that Bruce’s excellent dental hygiene apparently carries over to his greener form.

The one thing Natasha hadn’t covered in her lecture was whether Hulk was capable of understanding the kinds of things Bruce understood. She gets that he’s not going to be performing feats of scientific prowess, at least until they invent much larger Erlenmeyer flasks, but can she talk to Hulk? Really talk to him? Is there a person in there, or is he all instinct?

“Are you okay?” she finds herself asking, because if this was Bruce—and it is—that’s what she’d be asking him.

Hulk tips his head back and roars, which is, yes, terrifying, but part of her thinks that it isn’t meant to be. She’s not even sure why she thinks that—maybe just because, if he wanted to scare her, he could do something way worse.

“We’re safe,” she tells him, and okay, she’s allowed some wishful thinking. “No bad guys here. No one to hurt us. Just you and me, and I’m your friend. Right, buddy? You know who I am?”

Hulk huffs again, and gives her a long, slow blink. It’s so much like Bruce, the way he reacts when she reminds him of something totally obvious that’s completely slipped his mind—like when he’s looking for the glasses that are perched on top of his head—that her heart seizes.

“Okay. Okay. We’re gonna try something. Do you remember Natasha, your teammate? With the red hair and the bangin’ black catsuit?”

Another slow blink.

“Natasha told me there’s something you do after missions, after all the bad guys have been smashed. Just you and her.”

Hulk holds up his massive, hubcap-sized hand. “ _Lull-a-by_ ,” he rumbles.

Darcy feels herself lighting up, like she just jammed her toe into an outlet. “That’s right! Natasha taught me your lullaby. She said to tell you, sun’s getting real low.”

Hulk regards her for a long moment, like he’s trying to decide whether Darcy qualifies as an adequate substitute for Natasha for lullaby purposes. Briefly, hysterically, she entertains the mental image of a grumpy Hulk in footie pajamas kicking up a fuss about being put to bed by the babysitter. _Not Hulk’s real mommy_ , she imagines him grumbling.

Cautiously, wondering if this is going to be the last thing she ever does as a person who possesses all the arms she was born with, Darcy stretches a hand out, palm up, to the Hulk. If Hulk is willing to go along with this, he should put his hand in hers next—Natasha hadn’t specified how that worked exactly, considering that Darcy’s whole hand is the size of Hulk’s thumbnail, but Darcy supposes that there’s some hovering and make-believe involved.

It takes everything she has not to jump when Hulk reaches out to her in turn. He doesn’t give her his hand; rather, he drags the tip of one huge, calloused finger down her forearm, brushing the dead tissue of her soulmark.

“ _Hurt_ ,” he says, and there’s a new note in his voice. It sounds like something no one had ever told her Hulk was capable of feeling or expressing. It sounds like sadness.

Hulk remembers her, she realizes. Hulk knows her because Bruce knows her. Maybe he even remembers _why_ Bruce got angry enough to let him out in the first place.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she tells him. “Totally fine now. All better.” She takes a deep breath. “Okay, sweetie. Your turn.”

Darcy holds her hand up, praying that Hulk goes along with the rest of it. And that it works like it’s supposed to. _Please God don’t let Bruce wake up to find out he’s smashed me,_ she thinks. _Just let him get out of this without anything new to hate himself for. And me, let me get out of this without dying, that would be awesome too._

Hulk looks like he’s not completely convinced that Darcy is as fine as she’s claiming, which, fair enough; it’s hard to sell herself as being 100% A-Okay under the circumstances. Hulk’s skepticism is well-founded. But then he turns his hand out, palm up, the mirror of her earlier gesture, and Darcy’s heart lifts.

Carefully, gently, she strokes her fingers down the inside of Hulk’s wrist.

His skin is astonishingly soft. She’s not sure what she was expecting; some sort of thick, leathery hide, maybe. Don’t bullets bounce right off of him? But it doesn’t feel like that at all; his skin feels new, like a young child’s, and suddenly she realizes how much it must _hurt_ when people shoot at him.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, hoping it will cover how much her voice is shaking. “Go to sleep. Everything will be okay when you wake up.”

The way Natasha described it, Hulk snaps out it almost as soon as she says the code phrase; the arm petting is just a bonus, to ease him through the transition. But here, with Darcy, Hulk lets the petting go on for a minute, before his eyes begin to flutter shut, and he starts to wobble where he sits.

When Hulk falls over, the whole room shakes. 

When he starts to shrink, Darcy looks away, relief welling up inside her like a wave. She can’t see through the tears, and it’s just as well; Bruce hadn’t been expecting to change, so he wasn’t wearing his special stretchy pants, and the next few minutes are going to be awkward enough without her having to look at Bruce with a straight face after she’s seen his bare ass.

She waits until she hears a low groan in what is unmistakably Bruce’s voice before she reaches out and snags the lab coat hanging from the back of her desk chair. She tosses it to him, keeping her eyes averted. “Do you know how to make the scary red light go away?” she asks, trying to keep most of the wobble out of her voice.

She wants her voice to be the first thing Bruce hears. She doesn’t want to give him a single second to think that he’s killed her, or hurt her seriously.

There’s a curse, and she hears what sounds like someone scrambling to their feet in the near darkness. Then Bruce says, “ _Darcy_?”, and he sounds so absolutely shattered that she realizes that, for his sake, she’s going to have to hold it together for another few minutes at least.

“Present and accounted for, dude,” she says.

Bruce whirls around, looking for her amidst the shadows and heaps of overturned furniture. She waves a little from her cozy spot hunched up against the wall, and Bruce makes a beeline for her, jumping over a table and sliding towards her on his knees.

“Are you hurt?” he demands, running his hands over her arms, running his fingers over the back of her head. “What did he do to you? Where’s Tony? Why didn’t you _run_?”

“I’m not hurt. Hulk was nice to me. And I totally tried to run, it’s not my fault the room turned into Fort Knox before I could get to the door.”

“He didn’t hit you? Didn’t throw anything at you? You gotta tell me the truth, Darcy. Even if you feel okay right now there could be internal bleeding—”

“Bruce.” Darcy surges forward and grabs his face between both of her hands. Bruce’s eyes are wide, disoriented, panicked. “This is what happened. You Hulked, I ran. When I couldn’t get out, I hid under the desk. Hulk came to check on me. When I told him I was okay, he let me give him his lullaby—Natasha taught me how to do it,” she adds, when his expression grows disbelieving. “Then he curled up and went to sleep. The whole thing was over in ten minutes, Bruce. Check the clock if you don’t believe me.”

Darcy lets go of Bruce, and he immediately turns a wild gaze over the room, like he really is looking for a clock. But just then, the red lights go off, plunging the room into darkness. A second later the normal lighting comes back on, blinding them both temporarily.

Someone blasts the door of the lab open a second after _that_ , and it’s one too many loud, unexpected noises for Darcy that day. She screams and throws herself against Bruce, whose arms wrap around her automatically. 

Then she hears voices over her head, loud and angry; Bruce is arguing with someone, and she hears metallic clanking nearby, someone saying her name.

Darcy takes a deep breath and tears her face away from Bruce’s shoulder to find Iron Man standing over her. The faceplate is down, and Tony is looking at her, grey-faced, wild-eyed, and frantic.

“We’re okay,” she says.

Just then, Bruce puts his hands on her shoulders and starts pushing her gently but inexorably out of his lap. Darcy gets the message and climbs shakily to her feet. The instant Bruce is clear of her, he makes a break for the door, stumbling out of the lab, past the crowd of security guards and Stark Industries employees who’ve gathered to take in the spectacle of Hulk and Iron Man and Iron Man’s soulmate having some kind of sordid meltdown in public.

She just bets one of them took a photo of her while she was clinging to a half-naked Bruce, too. Darcy really ought to have a word with Tony about the people he hires.

“JARVIS, secure the lab,” Tony says, like he’s reading her mind.

The lab doors swing shut, and the glass turns opaque. Tony steps out of his armor, and then Darcy finds herself in his arms.

“You can _not_ do this to me,” Tony whispers against her hair. “I just had major cardio-thoracic surgery, I can _not_ take this shit from you.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Darcy complains. Then her breath catches. “Oh my god. I showed him my soulmark. _This was all my fault_.”

Somehow, that’s what pushes her over the brink. Not the very real terror for her life, but her guilt over thoughtlessly dumping her personal crap on Bruce, when she of all people should have known better. Darcy screws her eyes shut and presses her face to Tony’s chest, clinging like she hasn’t clung to another living person in eight years.

Tony seems to take this as permission to use his initiative for awhile. Next thing Darcy knows, there’s only air beneath her feet. Tony carries her to the sofa, which sits miraculously unharmed at the back of the lab, and lays her down on the cushions. Then he lies down next to her, wrapping his legs and arms around her, practically crushing her head against his shoulder. He doesn’t give her room to so much as wipe her face until she’s stopped sobbing so much and started breathing more. Even then, he only pulls back long enough to plant his lips against her forehead, then against the top of her head.

“When I couldn’t get in through the blast doors, I turned on the live security feed,” he tells her eventually. “You handled Hulk like a fucking boss. You were brilliant. And I’m buying Natasha a palazzo in Florence.”

That seems like an acceptable gesture, as far as Darcy is concerned. Scale it down from a billionaire’s budget to, say, Darcy’s salary, and it’s probably equivalent to a really nice Harry & David’s hamper.

“I’ll move into the Tower,” she mumbles against Tony’s t-shirt.

Tony doesn’t say anything, but she feels him looking at her. She gets the sense that he doesn’t quite believe her. Like he thinks she might be in shock, or something.

“You can just send over some people with boxes,” she continues. “I don’t really want to see the place ever again. Did I tell you I live in a closet? An actual closet. So it should only take them like five minutes to pack my shit up. Oh, except, make sure they get all my silverware from the kitchen. A couple of my forks are my Nana’s real silver.”

Tony continues not saying anything. Then he starts rubbing circles into her back. “Okay,” he says, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but are you sure? I’m not going to be taking advantage of the moment if I follow up on this?”

Darcy sort of nods and shrugs at the same time. “I don’t want to be that far away from you anymore,” she says, grateful that they can’t really look at each other from this position. 

Above her, she hears a long whooshing sound, like Tony has just heaved the world’s most enormous sigh of relief.

“Okay, babe,” he whispers. “You got it.”


	7. Chapter 7

Here’s something about Darcy that she’s never bothered to tell anyone because, honestly, it just didn’t seem that important: she’s never lived alone before. 

In college, she always had roommates. Her scholarship covered her dorm rooms, but it didn’t extend to the price of a single. Then there had been…off-campus housing, and then there was Jane.

After Jane came the two lawyers and the busker, and a walk-in closet with a mattress on the floor and string lights from Ikea. With the salary Jane was paying her, she was better off financially than she’d ever been, but that still wasn’t saying a lot. She honestly hadn’t expected to ever be able to afford a place all on her own.

Now, however, she’s the soulmate of one of the world’s wealthiest men. So her money troubles should be over, right? Except that, while tabloid Darcy is apparently the freakin’ modern-day Cinderella, real-life Darcy hasn’t even started to cope with Tony’s wealth as it relates to her. Actually, as far as she’s concerned, Tony’s wealth doesn’t relate to her yet. 

She really likes what she’s got with Tony right now. She’s been walking around for a few days with this little buzz of excitement in her stomach, a constant, low-level awareness that there’s something really _good_ going on in her life, something that holds the promise of getting even better with time, and she kind of loves it. But she still isn’t ready to sign up for anything permanent. And that’s the thing about money: relationships change in a permanent way any time finances get involved. Even when the money in question belongs to a guy who could literally power the forge in his workshop by burning bundles of hundred dollar bills and never notice the difference.

It isn’t that Darcy thinks Tony would treat her any differently if she let him spend money on her. It’s totally the opposite. Darcy’s afraid that _she’s_ the one who might flip out and do something totally neurotic if she starts getting too complacent about the whole soulmate business. After all, there’s so much she and Tony still don’t know about each other. What if he decides that this true love and monogamy crap is for teenagers? What if he decides she’s too mouthy and stubborn and damaged for him and builds a life-model android to replace her? What if he’s secretly a Republican?

What if he changes when she moves in? 

She’s not paranoid. That is a _thing,_ a _documented_ thing. Some guys play it cool until they feel like you’ve acknowledged their _claim_ on you or whatever, and then, once you’ve tied the knot or set up housekeeping together, they turn into _possessive jackholes._

She should know.

If she didn’t think Tony was a good guy, she would have already disappeared by now. But there’s still a small voice at the back of her mind telling to play it cool, to safeguard her independence until she’s tested the waters for a little longer.

Volunteering to move into the Tower probably counts as jumping in the deep end, but again: it doesn’t have to be permanent. Hell, she’s not even signing a lease. If anything, she’s better equipped to flee the city at a moment’s notice than she was a few days ago. Assuming, you know, that JARVIS doesn’t have orders to seal her into her room like Rapunzel in her tower if she shows signs of getting twitchy.

In the mean time, it’s worth the risk. She has a sweet new pad that’s just a short elevator ride away from her boyfriend and her best friend, and it comes with an unlimited decorating budget via JARVIS, which she _might_ actually use. It doesn’t really count as spending Tony’s money on herself if she’s just furnishing one of his empty rooms, right? If anything, she’s donating her services as an interior decorator.

Well, technically, she’s donating her services and Bruce’s, but she suspects he’s going to suck at decorating, so she’s okay with taking all the credit.

“Check it out,” Darcy tells Bruce, sweeping past him into the living room. “Bedroom with ensuite, guest rooms, guest baths, common area, office, kitchen and dining area. I’ve got doors that lock, soundproofed walls, no neighbors, except for Jane and Nat, who are both elsewhere. No funny smells, no rats, no mice, no roaches, no rent. Where is the bad here?”

“Um,” says Bruce.

It had taken Darcy an hour and a half to pry Bruce out of his room this morning. She’d given him his space after the whole surprise Hulking incident last night, partly because she figured he needed it, partly because Tony was really kind of clingy all evening (and if Darcy is completely honest, she’d been clinging right back). But she’d been at his door first thing this morning. She knows him well enough by now to guess what happens inside his head when he’s left stewing for too long after an incident. 

“What’s wrong?” she demands. “What did I miss? Did Tony give me a talking toaster? No wait, that would be awesome. Oh my god, did he give me a talking toilet?”

She’s being disingenuous on purpose, because, _obviously_ , she knows why Bruce is _umm_ -ing at her. 

In his eyes, the automatic downside to her—or anyone—moving into the Tower is that _he_ lives there too. With all his potential Hulkingness. 

They need to talk about what happened yesterday, but there’s talking, and then there’s indulging his bullshit. If Bruce is gonna give her the speech about how he’s dangerous and she needs to stay away from him, better to give him an opening now, so she can get the yelling out of the way.

Bruce is a master of evasion, however, in conversation as much as anything else, so when Darcy gives him her best innocent, blinking stare, he switches tracks.

“I don’t know how much….help I can be, with this.” Bruce gestures to the laughably small pile of boxes the movers have transported from her old apartment (closet) a few blocks away. “I mean, you’ve seen my lab. I don’t really arrange things so much as…put them down and forget where I left them.”

“Yeah, no, like I’d let an aesthetically-challenged Gen X-er tell me how to arrange my room,” Darcy agrees, ignoring Bruce’s snort. “You’re here for moral support. And for when I need someone tall.”

Bruce arches his eyebrows. “You…are the very first person who’s ever called me tall.”

“Oh, come on. I _know_ you’ve had girlfriends.”

“Um.” Bruce colors slightly. “Only one that I ever lived with, and…Betty was three inches taller than me, actually.”

“Huh.” Darcy tries to picture it; she totally can, it’s _precious_. “She still got you to lift stuff though, right?”

“Not that often, no.”

“Wow. Go Betty the Valkyrie. But seriously, I’m 5’3. Working on a different scale, here.”

Bruce concedes with a shrug of his shoulders. “I _am_ pretty good at team-wrestling a fitted sheet over a mattress.”

“See? I knew you’d be invaluable.” 

Behind her, the door slides open. (They don’t do that on every floor of the Tower, or Darcy would have exhausted her repertoire of Star Trek jokes way before now, but apparently they do on the personal floors.) A kid—about 18 or 19, blonde, skinny, wearing a moving company uniform—steps in, carrying her last four boxes on a dolly.

“Thanks dude,” she says. “Park her anywhere. Did you get a tip? I’ve got cash around here somewhere.”

“Uh, it’s been taken care of,” says the kid, blushing, and Darcy adds _doesn’t stint on tips_ to her mental list titled _Stuff I Like About My New Soulmate._

Darcy is looking at the labels on the sides of the boxes (there are only three categories: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) when the boy suddenly blurts out, “Is it true that you’re cheating on Iron Man with the Hulk?”

Darcy freezes. She can actually feel the blood rushing out of her face. She looks up at Bruce, wide-eyed.

But Bruce doesn’t meet her eyes. He’s too busy striding across the room, his pace threateningly quick, “ _Leave_ ,” he says, not even that loudly, but the kid scrambles. He makes it out of the door the split second before Bruce catches up with him; Bruce shuts it behind him, and engages the privacy locks.

“Can you get security on that?” he says, and it takes Darcy a confused moment to realize he’s talking to JARVIS, not her.

“Yes, Dr. Banner. I have already alerted Mr. Hogan and Mr. Stark.”

“Shit,” Darcy hisses, screwing her eyes shut and hitting her forehead with the heel of her hand. “JARVIS, don’t let Tony do anything stupid.”

“I must ask you to be more specific, Miss Lewis. At any given point in the day, Mr. Stark is—”

“I mean, don’t let him throw the guy in a dungeon or whatever.”

“I will pass your recommendation along to Mr. Stark.”

Darcy lets out a huge, deflating sigh and flops down onto the sofa. Bruce comes to sit beside her; he makes an aborted gesture with his hand, and she knows that he started to pat her shoulder or something, only to think better of it. Like the Hulk thing last night just eroded all the comfortable intimacy they’ve spent three months building.

 _Fuck that_ , Darcy decides, and adjusts her flop sideways so she’s leaning against Bruce’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Bruce says, like he’s a whole new level of alarmed suddenly. He winds an arm around her back and squeezes her shoulder. “It’ll be okay. Tony’s people will deal with it.”

“Yeah, I know, I just…” Darcy rubs her eyes, suddenly feeling tired in a way she hadn’t a few minutes before. “That was my first up-close-and-personal famous person experience. Guess it had to happen sooner or later.”

Bruce’s grip tightens. “It won’t happen again.”

Darcy snorts. “Um, of course it will. I was on the cover of the _Daily Bugle_. And that guy wasn’t even like, a sneaky reporter in a fake uniform. He was just a normal dude who recognized me.”

“Yeah, but not everyone who recognizes you is going to say awful things and try to upset you.”

“Really?” Darcy turns and arches a skeptical eyebrow at him. “Are you speaking from personal experience as a famous person?”

“Admittedly, my face isn’t the one people usually recognize. But people are people. There’ll always be a mix of good _and_ bad. It’s…easier to deal with when you can trust the people who are closest to you.”

“I hear that,” Darcy nods, and decides now is as good a time as any for an awkward, forced segue. “So does that mean you’re gonna stick with me? No fleeing the country because you’re so dangerous or whatever? Because, of the people I trust completely, one-quarter of them is sitting on the sofa with me right now.”

Bruce lets out a long, weary sigh. He takes his arm back and leans forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Sneaky,” he says, in a faintly accusing voice.

“Hey, I do what it takes,” she says agreeably.

“Yeah, I figured that out this morning when you told JARVIS you were going to camp outside my door until I let you in.”

“I’m kind of a ruthless person.”

“Yeah. Have I told you yet that sometimes you really remind me of Tony?”

“Huh.” Darcy lets that settle in for a moment. She can see it, sort of. Granted, she doesn’t have the unlimited resources necessary to throw everyone she loves into a huge tower and dig a moat around them, but she can see herself wanting to. Not that she’ll probably ever get a chance to be protective towards a group of superheroes who all think of her as the vulnerable one, but if she could, she would.

And it’s nice to think that she might have something in common with her soulmate, other than the massive trust issues.

“Speaking of Tony.” Bruce pushes his glasses up on his nose. “Does he, uh, know where you are right now?”

At first Darcy assumes he’s talking about the kid and the security breach, and she starts to point out that, if Tony needs to lay eyes on her to be sure she’s okay, JARVIS can just tell him where to find her. Then she sees the way that Bruce is squirming, and she realizes he’s not talking about that at all.

“You mean, did I ask him for permission to hang out with my best friend? Yeah, no, I didn’t do that. Totally slipped my mind, I can’t think why.”

She and Tony _had_ talked about Bruce last night. Darcy had needed him to reassure her that he wasn’t thinking about kicking Bruce out, and Tony had sworn up and down that he knew what he was getting into, inviting Bruce to live with him in the first place, and that his friendship with Bruce wasn’t going to suffer just because Darcy tangled briefly with his greener side. Which is a good thing, because if she had to choose between them…well, that would be awkward. And kind of impossible, and in that scenario Darcy suspects she’s the one who’d be fleeing the city. Because of the awkwardness.

“Also,” she continues, “let me just point out that, of the two people I spend all my time with, I kind of rely on you to be the one who doesn’t treat me like I need a permission slip from the teacher to make my own decisions. I _just_ schooled Tony about his caveman bullshit. I will be cranky if I have to do the same thing to you.”

She glares at Bruce, but he’s too busy grimacing at the floor to notice. “When it comes to this kind of thing, I don’t think Tony’s completely wrong.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I _am_ dangerous, Darcy. If you were as smart as I’ve always thought you were, you’d see that.”

Darcy feels the breath leave her lungs, like someone’s punched her in the stomach. 

The thing about Bruce is that the same quiet, watchful approach to life that endowed him with the wicked, sly sense of humor that first drew her to him also equipped him with the kind of insight that lets him cut right to the bone when he wants to. 

He _knows_ how insecure Darcy is about her education, about not being able to keep up with all the geniuses in her life. He’s just never used that against her before.

The silence builds between them for a moment, until finally Bruce looks over at her. He winces at whatever it is he sees in her face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Nope,” she says. “Too late, no take-backs. You just implied that I was stupid, and now you get to deal with the consequences.”

“You’re not stupid, Darcy, I just—”

“ _I_ know I’m not stupid,” she says, making her voice flat. “But you’re doing that thing all you genius scientists do, where you’re so used to being right about science and whatever that you always assume you have all the facts. Even though your Ph.D. is in particle physics, not psychology.”

Bruce sighs again, nodding in that way where he’s not actually agreeing, just putting on a show of going along with what she’s saying to avoid a conflict. “Okay, Darcy.”

“No, don’t even try to pacify me. You’re going to _listen_. You _owe me_.”

There is absolutely no way Bruce can argue with that without rejecting the entire premise of his whole guilt fugue, and he knows it. Slowly, reluctantly, he turns so that he’s facing her. 

Darcy jabs a finger in his face, and his eyes cross slightly.

“I _know_ Hulk is dangerous,” she tells him. “I knew that _before_ I got locked into the lab with him. And I get that you think that your mild-mannered charm fools people into forgetting that he’s part of you, but I don’t think anyone who really knows you ever forgets it. Because, your whole shy routine? It’s an act. Kind of like me, and how I pretend that my working vocabulary is mostly made up of words of one syllable.”

Bruce looks deeply uncomfortable, and for once, Darcy couldn’t care less. 

“Here’s the part that you don’t get,” she continues. “ _I’m in danger anyway._ You running away isn’t going to change that.”

“Darcy…”

“Nope, it’s still listening time for you.” She crosses her arms. “Do you even know what I survived just to get here? Tony _maybe_ had a point about how his crazy bling-bling paparazzi world isn’t my turf, but the rest of it? The monsters and aliens and superheroes part? I got drafted into that world a long before I met either of you. Actually, I could argue that, after the invasion, _all of planet earth_ got drafted, but that’s beside the point. I’m _Tony Stark’s soulmate_. Somewhere out there, someone’s already wondering if maybe kidnapping me is a good way to get to him. There are no safe options for people like us. But at least, when I’m with my friends, I _feel safe_. That’s as good as it gets in this world, Bruce.”

She can tell that she’s not really getting through to him. His face is white and stony, and he looks like he’s hanging onto his composure by a thread. Unfortunately for him, she hasn’t even brought out the big guns yet.

“The way I see it,” she says, trying to sound a little more casual than she feels, “is that the very worst thing Hulk can do is smash me. Which, admittedly, would suck. But dying? Not my biggest fear. I mean, it’s up there, but it doesn’t wake me up at three in the morning.”

“No, that’s just me,” says Bruce, sarcasm bleeding into bitterness. 

“Which sucks, and the fact that you care that much is part of why I care about _you_. But it isn’t all about you and your big sad feelings. It’s at least partially about me and _my_ big sad feelings.”

Bruce’s mouth falls open. His look of grim self-disgust gives way to confusion, which is Darcy’s cue to move in for the kill.

“Hulk could kill me. I get that. I don’t think he wants to, but accidents happen. You know what Hulk _won’t_ do to me?” Darcy leans forward a little. She’s not going to get right up in Bruce’s face, but she is going to make sure that she has his _complete_ attention. “He won’t tell me he loves me and then treat me like shit for two years and let me think it’s my own fault. He won’t make me trust him and then burn me in my _sleep_ just to stop me from ever being happy with anyone else. And he won’t act like my best friend and let me hang around in the lab then _run away_ before he teaches me all the stuff he promised to.”

Bruce’s confused look gives way to chagrin, and sadness, and just a hint of anger. But she doesn’t think the anger is for her.

“Do you get it now?” she says, softly this time. “I _need_ you.”

Bruce is staring at his hands. Darcy slumps dramatically back against the couch cushions. They sit there quietly for a minute or so—long enough that Darcy starts to wonder if she made a mistake, venting all that stuff into the open. Not because Bruce didn’t need to hear it, but because, without frustration and anger to hold onto, all she has is the sad, helpless worry that it doesn’t matter what she says to him—it won’t be enough.

But then Bruce clears his throat. “I wasn’t going to leave,” he says quietly.

Darcy frowns at him. “Really?”

“I thought about it. Thinking about it is…instinct.” He rubs his palm over his knuckles. “But I watched the security feed from the lab. Hulk remembered you, even though I haven’t known you as long as the others. And the lullaby worked the way it was supposed to. It could have been worse.” He takes a deep breath. “It scares the hell out of me, thinking about how much worse it could have been. You were right about one thing, Darcy; it’s not really about other people. It’s about how much I can live with. If he—if I’d hurt you, I don’t know how I could—”

Darcy sits up, but Bruce shakes his head. “Lately, though, people have been pointing out to me that the more stable my life is, the more I spend time with people I trust, the less out of control the other guy is. And what happened yesterday…it wasn’t good, but the evidence seems to support the theory.”

Darcy takes this in for a moment, letting relief steal over her. “So why were you such an asshole to me if you weren’t trying to keep me from talking you into staying?”

Bruce leans his head against his hands. “Because sometimes I’m just an asshole? Can’t blame the other guy for everything. I’m sorry, by the way.”

Darcy sighs and pats his arm. “Do it again and I’ll shave all your chest hair while you’re sleeping.”

Bruce drops his head into his hands, choking helplessly.

“I’m sorry too, by the way.” It’s Darcy’s turn to study her hands. “I feel pretty bad about setting you off like that.”

Bruce sobers instantly. “Don’t, Darcy. It was not your fault.”

“So the reason you Hulked wasn’t because I completely blindsided you with the information that I used to be in a physically abusive relationship, completely forgetting about the fact that you have horrible, traumatic firsthand experience with that sort of thing?”

Bruce’s mouth falls open. “I…I didn’t know you knew about that.”

“Despite appearances, I don’t repeat _everything_ I hear. It wasn’t any of my business.” 

Darcy has moved on from looking at her hands to staring at the blank, white wall of her new living room, so it takes her by surprise when Bruce pulls her hand into his.

“I know my triggers better than anyone, and even I couldn’t have predicted I would react that way.” He squeezes her fingers, and with his free hand he rubs at his eyes. “I guess it doesn’t shock me that the idea of someone hurting you like that could make me angry enough to…but there are always other factors involved when I transform involuntarily. You’re not a mind reader. It wasn’t your fault.”

“‘Kay. I’ll stop feeling guilty when you do.”

“That’s…” Bruce sighs. “Sneaky. Seriously.”

“Whatever it takes,” she says again, patting his knee. “Enough mushy talk. We have an apartment to decorate.”

“I thought you said I was an aesthetically challenged Gen X-er.”

“Totally, but you can help me pick out some awesome science-themed posters to order for my walls.”

For the first time all morning, Bruce smiles at her, and something tight and tense deep inside Darcy finally relaxes.

*

Contrary to her fears, Tony doesn’t come storming up to her apartment in a rage over the rude kid from the moving company, or for any other reason. She doesn’t see him at all, actually, until a couple of hours after she and Bruce have finished arranging her paltry possessions around the apartment. It’s still pretty bare when they’re done, but by the time Bruce begs off for the evening, it’s starting to look and feel like a space that belongs to her. Especially in the bedroom, once Bruce helps her hang the string lights up over her bed. 

String lights, she realizes quickly, look really out of place in a Stark Tower apartment. Especially when they’re hanging from multicolored thumbtacks that Darcy stole from some departmental corkboard back in college. But there’s nothing she can do about that. Everything she owns was purchased at Goodwill, Wal-Mart, or Target, and all of it clashes with the tastefully generic designer furnishings that came with the apartment. But she loves her threadbare purple floral comforter; her whole freshman dorm room was inspired by Bella Swan’s bedroom in the first _Twilight_ movie, but Darcy is mostly over the shame by now. None of her pictures are framed, but her movie poster of _The Great Dictator_ is Darcy’s second most treasured possession on earth (after her tattered copy of _Pale Blue Dot_ ). It makes her happy to have her things around her, shabby though they may be.

In any case, her belongings fit in around the apartment about as well as Darcy herself fits in around Stark Tower, but who is she trying to impress? Bruce, whose entire collection of earthly goods fits into one battered hobo bag? Tony might sniff disdainfully, because he’s kind of snobby for a guy whose hands are permanently stained with engine grease, but he’ll get over it. He’s not going to be spending any significant amount of time in her bedroom, anyway. Not for awhile, at least.

After Bruce leaves, Darcy takes an hour to stress test the springs in her new mattress by jumping on it. Then she sprawls out on top of the covers with her laptop, scrolling Tumblr and letting herself get used to the subtle quirks of her new environment. 

Every other place she’s ever lived, the background ambiance has included the sounds of pipes gurgling, neighbors shouting, things skittering in the walls. Here, the only thing she has to get used to is the silence. That, more than the precision engineering of her mattress and the pile depth of the carpeting, is what reminds her that she’s living in the lap of luxury. In a place like Manhattan, silence is like good water pressure—you have to pay through the nose for it.

Once Darcy finishes catching up with her Tumblr feed, it’s close to dinner time. She tests out her new, JARVIS-enabled food delivery options by ordering enough Thai takeout for two, then asks JARVIS to ask Tony to come join her for the meal. 

She spends all of ten minutes wondering if he’ll take her up on the invitation. He’s a busy guy after all, and while she’s never had trouble getting his attention before, she’s usually down in the lab or the workshop with him, keeping him company while he works, rather than distracting him from his projects.

But then there’s a soft chime at her door, and when she answers it, Tony is standing in the hallway, holding a box under one arm and balancing the takeout containers in both hands. He’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and a smile that Darcy reads as slightly nervous.

Nervous, it turns out, is an endearing look on Tony Stark. She beams at him, and he looks a little more relaxed.

“Intercepted the delivery guy at the elevator downstairs,” he says, indicating the takeout boxes with a small shrug. 

“Is that standard procedure, or special treatment for your new housemate?”

Tony grimaces. “The businesses that deliver here have all been vetted, but _apparently_ , it’s not a perfect system. Figured I’d run interference until I, you know, fix that.”

Darcy processes this for a second, before coming to the conclusion that she’s fine with it. This is Tony’s home; he’s allowed to have rules about who’s allowed inside. Maybe he’s being extra twitchy because it’s her, but there’s a difference between being controlling and being protective. She’s fine with the latter. It’s kind of nice, actually.

“Then please, enter my abode,” she says, waving him into the apartment. “I would say ‘my humble abode’, but it’s your Tower, so…”

“Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I never thought humility had any place in architectural design.” Tony saunters inside and lets Darcy take the food out of his hands and carry it into the dining area. He follows her, looking around with an air of studied nonchalance. “I love what you haven’t done with the place.”

“Sorry, dude, I just moved in this morning. Haven’t really got around to knocking out walls or whatever.”

“You did actually move in though, right?”

“Literally everything I own is now here.”

“That…” Air hisses between Tony’s teeth, like a sigh, but more disapproving. 

“Dude, what?” Darcy starts gathering up plates and utensils. “I’ve been following Jane around the world for practically a decade. I traveled light.”

“No, it’s fine. Some of my favorite people are completely bereft of material possessions.” He’s right behind her, grabbing beer out of the refrigerator (her refrigerator is stocked with beer, apparently) and seating himself in the chair closest to hers.

“You mean Bruce,” she says.

“Yeah, pretty much just Bruce. The drunken noodles are mine, by the way, unless your tongue is coated in Teflon. They make it triple hot just for me.”

“Huh, sounds like they made it just for me, actually.”

Tony passes her the carton and salutes her with his beer. Darcy loads up her plate and passes it back to him.

“Have you ever wondered how our lives would have been different if we’d met earlier?” he says—waiting, of course, until Darcy’s mouth is full, and her eyes watering. “I did. This morning. Don’t remember what got me thinking about it.”

“Huh.” Darcy picks up her own beer and eyes him over the lip. It sounds like a casual comment, but she sort of has the feeling that the more casual and offhand Tony sounds, the less casual he actually feels. “I guess it depends on how much earlier you mean. Not to start in with the age cracks again, but I’ve only been legal for about a decade.”

“Yeah, what do you think people do in those situations? With the age gaps and the awkward adult-child encounters. You never hear about those, but it’s gotta happen sometimes.”

Darcy shrugs. “I never really thought about it before.” 

That’s a lie. Darcy is lying through her teeth. If there’s a way for something to go horribly wrong between soulmates, she’s thought about it at length. She was born with Tony’s Words on her arm, so she always knew her soulmate would be older than her. She’s been coming up with theories about age gap complications since she was in single digit ages.

“What would you have done?” she prods, trying to sound casual.

“What do you mean?”

“If we’d met when, say, I was ten, and you were twenty-seven. What would you have done?”

“Jesus.” Tony winces. Then he shoves too many noodles into his mouth, probably buying time to think while he chews. “It would have strongly depended on like, the day. Probably also the time of day.”

“How so?”

“If I was drunk at the time, I probably would not have handled it well. If I was sober, I would have let Obi take care of it, and that would have created…other issues.” 

“So if you were drunk, you would have freaked out?”

“Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking.” Tony, she’s just noticed, is ignoring the plate she took the trouble of bringing him, and is eating straight from the carton. “I wouldn’t have run. I’d have done the opposite, probably.”

Darcy blinks at him. “By ‘the opposite’, are we talking about some kind of kidnapping child-bride situation, or…”

“Fuck’s sake, Lewis.” Tony chokes on rice noodles. “No. No, I mean…I would have wanted to know you. Not _Biblically_ , but thank you for that nightmare image. I would have wanted…I don’t know, for us to be part of each other’s lives somehow. But I probably would have made a huge ass out of myself and scared your family into hiding you away until you were eighteen.”

“Yeah, no.” Darcy snorts. “Not my mom. She would have been way, way too into you being Tony Stark. Come to think of it, she was only a couple of years older than you, so she might have—”

“How much money can I pay you to not finish that sentence?”

She smirks at the samosa she’s burying underneath an actual mountain of mango chutney. “I’ll take a free luxury apartment, thanks.”

“Done.”

“Awesome. What about the other scenario?”

He stares into his carton. “Obi probably would have tried to mold you into the ideal future Mrs. Stark, probably by bribing your mom into sending you to a boarding school he picked out. Same kind of place I went, somewhere that specializes in grooming kids from powerful families.”

Darcy blinks a few times. “That…doesn’t sound so bad actually. I mean, comparatively speaking.” Compared to the kind of education she’d actually had, anyway. “Who is Obi, again?”

For a second, she thinks Tony’s not going to answer. “Obadiah. Stane. Dad’s business partner. Mine too. Had me kidnapped in Afghanistan, stole the arc reactor out of my chest when I got back. He’s dead now. I killed him. Pepper helped.”

Darcy stares at him. Tony isn’t eating anymore, just moving the noodles around with his chopsticks.

After half a minute of silence, he looks up at her, and his expression softens. “Hey, it’s okay. I wasn’t trying to…it was a long time ago.”

“Eight years ago.” 

“Uh, yeah, actually.”

“You came back from Afghanistan and told the world you were Iron Man just a couple of months before my whole fake soulmate deal.”

Tony blinks several times in a row. “Really.”

“If my math is right.”

“That’s…” Tony shakes his head. “I’m not really a big believer in destiny or whatever, but that’s a little weird.”

“Right? I guess that was kind of our year.” Darcy shrugs. “I mean, I started working for Jane, like, immediately afterwards, and once Thor got here, it was probably just a matter of time until we ran into each other.”

Tony’s mouth is a tight, unhappy line. “I was ready to hire Foster as soon as she published that paper after New Mexico. I almost did, but I got…distracted. Stuff kept happening.”

“I’ll bet.” Darcy watches him for a moment. Underneath the table, she finds his leg with the toe of her shoe and nudges his calf. Apart from crisis-induced hugging, it’s the first time she’s touched him like this, casually and simply. She can see the surprise ripple through him, and then the slight melting of the tension in the set of his shoulders. 

“I don’t know how that would have worked out, honestly, if we’d met then,” she admits. “I was a huge mess. You think I’m flinchy and weird now, but I am totally zen compared to six or seven years ago.”

He nods. “I was too. Kind of…unstable, really, for awhile.” He sets his chopsticks aside, folding his arms over his chest. He’s studying her in a way that makes her think he’s trying to picture Freshly Traumatized Darcy circa 2010. Darcy is surprised that the scrutiny doesn’t make her uncomfortable. 

“Jesus,” he says softly, like he’s talking to himself more than to her. “I would have killed him.” 

Darcy chokes on her beer. “Excuse me?”

“I know you don’t like the macho posturing bullshit, but it’s not about that.” Tony’s tone is quick, light, matter-of-fact. “I was sick. Dying, actually. Palladium core in the arc reactor, leading to heavy metal toxicity. I didn’t see a way out, so I got kind of obsessed with…putting my affairs in order, I guess. I made Pepper CEO of the company, gave Rhodey the War Machine armor.” He picks up his beer, but he doesn’t drink. “I was setting up trust funds, trying to make sure the people who were important to me would be taken care of.”

Darcy thinks she can see where he’s going with this. “So while you were tying up loose ends…”

“There’s no way I would have left you alone in the world with that guy still walking around in it.” He shrugs. “My thinking was pretty black and white back then.”

Darcy takes a deep breath. There’s a funny sort of tingling in her face, in her fingers and toes. She’s trying not to read too much into it. “And now?”

Tony looks aside, out the panoramic window that runs the entire length of the apartment. The view of the city skyline outside is like a postcard brought to life. “The threat-detection algorithm JARVIS is running on your email flagged a few messages last week. I didn’t get a chance to review them personally until this morning.”

This morning, Tony would have woken up fresh from last night’s Hulk incident. Some part of him was probably still anxious about her; reviewing the security data was probably his way of trying to channel that anxiety into useful ends. “And?”

Tony takes his phone out of his pocket. He swipes the screen a few times, then sits there, staring at it.

“I can summarize,” he says. “Or you can see them for yourself.”

Darcy feels an acid spike in her stomach. She doesn’t think it’s from Tony’s five alarm drunken noodles. “Summarize first?”

She thinks he’s relieved by this. “Email is just a random string of numbers and characters. Sender doesn’t identify himself but he talks like he knows you—”

“How so?”

“First message subject line was ‘remember me?’ And there are….details. He knows what you look like.”

“My picture is all over the internet.”

“He knows about your soulmark.”

Tony says it fast, like ripping off a band-aid. Darcy clutches her arm without noticing she’s done it, until she realizes Tony is staring at her hand where it grips just above her wrist.

“You mean he knows I don’t have one,” she says.

“You _do_ have a soulmark,” says Tony, and she’s heard him sound angry before, but not like this. Not so mixed with helplessness. “You do. I’ve seen it. It’s _mine_. I recognize my handwriting, even with…just, fuck him. He doesn’t get to have that.”

Darcy turns sideways in her chair. She takes one very deep breath, then another, and then the third one is a sob.

Tony is up out of his chair like a shot. She expects him to grab her up, maybe carry her to the sofa like he did yesterday, but instead, he kneels on the floor at her feet.

His fingers on her arm are strong enough that she doesn’t even try to pry them away, because she knows she couldn’t, but they are also very, very gentle. He tugs her hand up from where it covers her scar under her sleeve. He rucks her sleeve up to her elbow, and then, still gentle, he runs his hand over the scar. For a second, he covers it with his palm. Then he takes his hand away and presses his lips to the smooth, pink tissue.

This isn’t helping Darcy retain her composure in the slightest. 

Tony lets go of her arm and cups both hands around her face. “He’s not going to get anywhere near you. Not within a hundred miles. I’m not even gonna pretend that I’ve never broken a promise, because that would be pointless, you’re going to meet Pepper eventually and then I will have no more secrets, but I promise you, you’re safe. I can keep you safe.”

Darcy’s throat is sore with the tears she’s trying to (sort of) hold back. “Yeah. Okay. You do that. I’m fully on-board.”

“Our first team project.” He smiles up into her face, and even though his eyes are dark and troubled, there’s nothing forced about it. “You and me, kid. Douchebag McLimpdick doesn’t stand a chance.”

“First thing in the morning, we’re going to the lab and your or Bruce are going to teach me how to make poison gas.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Tony hangs his head, as if ashamed. “There are so many better ways to hurt people on short notice with chemistry.”

Darcy’s burst of laughter is as involuntary as her last sob. “You also promised to help me build a pumpkin trebuchet, but now I’m thinking something heavier.”

“I designed a missile system a few years ago, I think I can handle that.”

Darcy grips one of the hands holding her face. Tony’s smile widens, and gets up off the ground, tugging her to her feet. “Unless you had some other date night activity planned, we can go and get started right now, if you want.”

Darcy looks at Tony’s expression, from the lines around his eyes, to the set of his jaw, to the vulnerable mobility of his mouth. Something makes her think that Tony won’t be able to completely relax tonight until he’s surrounded metal objects and explosives. 

“Sounds good to me,” she manages. “And thanks, I didn’t actually realize this was a date. I mean, I probably would have worn a dress.”

“If you want to change first, I’m not even gonna pretend I’m not dying to see your legs.”

“Dude, you and Bruce are the first people who’ve seen my arms in eight years, what happened to taking it slow?”

Tony doesn’t laugh. But he does wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her neatly against his side. He keeps it there all the way out the door, and to the elevator.

*


	8. Chapter 8

8.

The thing is, falling in love with Tony was never a foregone conclusion. Whatever cosmic force is responsible for the existence of soulmarks, it isn’t stronger than free will. Not _hers_ , at least. 

For the last eight years of her life, her soulmark has felt like a bullseye, and her soulmate, whoever they were, was a guided missile. Knowing they were out there somewhere made her feel like a target. Like a victim in waiting, if she’s going to be completely real here. Yes, she knows that’s fucked up. Yes, she’s considered therapy.

Here’s what’s taken her totally by surprise about Tony: he seems to just _get_ all of that. Sure, he’s got some entitlement issues—he grew up stinking rich, that’s only to be expected—but they don’t extend to Darcy’s emotions. He’ll cross boundaries to keep her safe, but he’s not taking it for granted that she trusts him, or even likes him. Hell, he acts like she’s doing him a favor just by sharing takeout with him, or letting him give her a hug when shit gets scary.

So even though Darcy has had her guard up from the moment she met him, she’s helpless to deny that Tony is _ridiculously_ charming, and not at all in the way she expected. The Tony Stark she knows from TV is a smooth-talking, quippy guy who used to proposition reporters in the middle of live interviews, smooth, polished, and seductive. The guy she hangs around with in the workshop is self-conscious and uncertain. He got her a cheap plastic shower curtain with the periodic table printed in bright blocks of color for a housewarming present, and he dropped it off at her door without even waiting around so she could thank him. The tabloids would shit themselves if they knew; half their news copy is devoted to feverish speculation about the cars, the clothes, the expensive jewelry he’s supposedly heaping on her.

Darcy is starting to realize that Tony allows himself to be vulnerable around her in a way that most people never see. It’s so disarming that she suspected he was faking it for her benefit, until she realized that he let Bruce see that side of him as well. Pepper, too, probably, although Darcy hasn’t met Pepper personally yet.

Pepper had reached out to her through email the day after Darcy moved into the Tower. Darcy had sort of been expecting it, but the sight of Pepper’s name in her overburdened inbox still produced a moment of panic. Not that the email had been hostile, or threatening, not in the least: Pepper said things like, _Tony’s told me so much about you,_ and, _I feel like I know you already._ It was the warmest welcome to the family she could have hoped for. But that’s kind of the problem. Pepper is one of the few people Tony considers indispensable, which is actually more intimidating to Darcy than if Pepper had hinted that Darcy was an unwelcome intrusion in her life. 

Tony is a good man. A wonderful person, who’s endured suffering and betrayal, and he deserves a less complicated soulmate, someone who can love him, simply and easily. A soulmate who doesn’t _require_ patience. So Darcy can’t help worrying that the people who love Tony are going to be less than impressed by his damaged, withholding _weirdo_ of a soulmate. 

She still doesn’t really understand why Tony puts up with the fact that she’s such hard work. Why does he even bother? He’s met the brightest, best, and most beautiful people in the world—not just groupies or whatever, but serious people at the top of their fields, people who actually understand his genius _and_ know the difference between Versace and Prada.

Darcy is painfully aware that, if it wasn’t for the soulmate thing, there would be absolutely no reason for Tony Stark to give her a second look, and since she doesn’t exactly _trust_ the soulmate thing, she can’t help feeling super uneasy.

Darcy had written a polite, perfunctory reply to Pepper’s email, with a vague promise of setting up a drinks date at some point in the future. She wishes she could just get over herself and make it happen, because she could _really_ do with some female company these days. Bruce is her bro, but with Jane gone, her options for socializing are seriously limited, and she can’t exactly go out and make friends in any kind of normal way when her face is plastered across newsstands like she’s America’s Most Wanted.

But until she can nerve herself up for a face to face with the CEO of Stark Industries, Darcy’s going to hang tight and try not to overthink the fact that Tony is sapping the fortifications she’s spent the last eight years building up around her capacity for squishy feelings.

Darcy’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since Tony looked at the scar on her arm and didn’t run for the hills. But the more time that passes, the more she’s starting to worry that, if anyone loses their grip on their footwear, it won’t be Tony—it’ll be her. 

After all, he’s doing everything right. She’s the one who has no idea what she’s doing at all.

*

One morning, about a week after she moved into the Tower, Darcy wakes up at her usual time and reaches automatically for her laptop. Checking her email before she’s showered is a habit she should probably break herself of, because it rarely does a damn thing to improve her morning, but the longer she puts it off, the more anxious she gets. JARVIS weeds out the messages that flag the filters Tony set up, but if there’s one thing she’s figured out since being catapulted into the limelight, it’s that emails don’t have to be vicious, or overtly threatening, to be really, _really_ upsetting. Even well-intentioned messages from Tony’s fans can make her cringe sometimes. And the constant barrage of inquiries from journalists just sets her teeth on edge. 

She could ask Tony to create new filters, or even just dump the whole mess on his PR team and set up a new account, but—and she knows this is dumb—she’s had this email address since 2005. It’s one of the only things from her old life that’s survived this long. And she wants to fight her own battles, as much as she can. Live a life as close to normal as possible, a goal that will _not_ be served by letting her robot overlord of a soulmate have a free hand with her email archive.

The one thing that can be said for the fact that she always expects the worst when she opens her inbox these days is that she’s rarely taken by surprise. But some days are worse than others. Today, for instance: there are triple the usual number of new messages in her inbox. 

Anytime her email volume increases that drastically, it can only mean one thing: some tabloid or newspaper has published a juicy new article about her, and everyone wants to know what she thinks about it. Tony and Bruce have both advised her not to read the articles, or even the emails, because they’re inevitably full of horseshit, and trying to correct them, or defend herself, will only make things worse. She normally reads a few emails at random just to get the lay of the land, then goes on a wholesale deleting spree.

Today, however, there’s one message that stands out from the rest, and it isn’t from a reporter. It’s from Pepper Potts.

Pepper doesn’t strike her as the sort of person to push an acquaintance—she’s too classy for that, and where would she even find the time? Darcy knew the ball was in her court, if she ever wanted to have a real conversation with Pepper. If she’s emailing Darcy now, there’s a reason.

She clicks on the message, hugging a pillow to her chest as it loads.

 

to: darcy.lewis@gmail.com  
from: virginia.potts@starkindustries.com  
subject: a belated introduction

Darcy, I thought today might be a good day to get in touch again. If you’re available this afternoon, would you be interested in getting lunch? 

In the mean time, if I can support you in any way, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Take care,  
Pepper 

Virginia Potts, CEO, Stark Industries | 212-269-5436 | v.potts@starkindustries.com

 

Here is the thing about having spent the last eight years working as a lab assistant to a couple of the biggest brains on the entire planet: Darcy speaks fluent corporate jargon. It comes from copy-editing Jane’s grant proposals and answering Bruce Banner’s emails. Plenty of people at the top of the research and development game want the minds that created the Hulk and discovered the Einstein-Rosen bridge working for them, and they’ll resort to some really epic sweet-talking to get it. 

So Darcy knows that when someone like Pepper Potts, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, says something like, “I thought today might be a good day to get in touch”, it means something _huge_ has happened _on that day_. And when Pepper says something like, “If I can support you in any way,” it means, “The sky is falling, Chicken Little; you’re gonna need the big guns to deal with it, and since you’re Tony’s soulmate, I’m offering to help.”

On a normal day, Darcy would probably find it reassuring that Pepper seems to see herself as being more or less on Darcy’s side. Right now, though, all Darcy can do is numbly back-button her way into her inbox and select another email at random, looking for the inevitable link to whatever story appeared in whatever tabloid that morning to rock her world.

It doesn’t take long. To be precise, it takes about five seconds. As soon as the website loads, her eyes fall on the article summary. 

_Sources close to Tony Stark’s elusive soulmate say she’s hiding a troubled past—and a history of faking soulmarks._

That’s as far as she gets before her vision goes white.

Darcy doesn’t snap back to her senses until her laptop starts to slide off her knees. She grasps for it with numb fingers and sets it carefully aside. Then, with a deliberate effort, she throws one leg, then the other, over the side of the bed, and walks into the bathroom.

Lucky for her, Stark Tower has an endless supply of hot water. Also lucky for her, JARVIS monitors her vitals, so when she’s been under the scalding water for nearly twenty minutes and is right on the edge of passing out, the temperature of the water drops ten degrees, causing Darcy to screech to high heaven and jump backwards out of the spray.

Part of her considers just having a seat on the bench built into the tiled wall and letting the cool water wash over her until she’s one big mass of pruney wrinkles. Then she imagines what will happen if she stays in the shower without moving for an hour, and decides that her morning will not be improved by triggering JARVIS’s safety protocols. Not when that will almost certainly lead to Tony bursting in on her to make sure she hadn’t drowned.

“JARVIS.”

“Yes, Miss Lewis.”

“Have you seen my inbox this morning?”

“I have, Miss Lewis.”

“So you’ve read the article.”

“Regrettably so.”

Darcy takes a deep breath. If _JARVIS_ finds the article “regrettable”, she knows she’s in for it. “Can you summarize it for me?”

JARVIS is silent for a moment.

“The article appeared this morning at 7:02 am on the _Daily Bugle_ website, in the society section. It was posted by staff writer Darlene Whitehall. The article is 374 words long. Ms. Whitehall reports on an interview which she conducted with a person whom she identifies pseudonymously as ‘Heather Smith’. Ms. Smith claims to be the soulmate of a young man who was once a university classmate of yours. She claims that you initiated a romantic relationship with this young man under false pretenses, having misled him into believing that your soulmarks were a match.” JARVIS pauses. “There are further claims and accusations, but that is the essence of the article.”

Darcy’s mouth is dry. “Let me guess,” she says tonelessly. “She insinuates I’m running the same fake soulmark scam on Tony.”

“I’m afraid so, Ms. Lewis.”

“Right. Okay. _Fuck_.” Darcy pushes her damp hair out of her face and stares down at the carpet. “Fuck.”

No wonder Pepper emailed her. They’re probably having a meltdown over at Stark Industries HQ, trying to get the story turned around. Unless they think it’s too trivial to bother acknowledging, and actually, why _would_ they think it was important? The only people in the world who know about Darcy’s soulmark are Jane, Tony, Bruce, and Corey. If you didn’t know how Darcy lost her soulmark, the _Daily Bugle_ story probably just sounds like some stranger’s desperate attempt to cash in on a distant connection. 

Darcy probably ought to be freaking out about this, but she just feels kind of numb. What she really wants to know—not that it makes any real difference—is whether this Heather person actually believes the story she fed the reporter, or whether this is some convoluted plan Corey cooked up to mess with Darcy long distance. Because, the way Darcy sees it, if she honestly thought someone had messed with her soulmate that way, she’d want the world to know how friggin’ evil they were too. Especially if she thought there was a chance they’d try it out on someone else.

Plus, she’s pretty curious about this Heather person claiming to be Corey’s soulmate. Is she really, or is Corey the one who’s running the same scam twice? Because she’d sort of like to kill him, if that’s the case. Just, borrow one of the Iron Man suits conveniently located a few stories above her, fly to New Mexico or wherever he’s holed up these days, and drop out of the sky right on top of him. Instant splatting, no need for awkward conversation.

“JARVIS.” Darcy rubs her eyes. “What about Tony?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Has Tony seen the article?”

“Yes, Ms. Lewis.”

Darcy is surprised. She’s still processing all the implications here, but she knows this is bad. Like, Monica-Lewinsky-during-the-Clinton-administration levels of public disgrace are probably going to be involved here. Normally, that’s the kind of thing that brings Tony running to her side. 

Not that she _needs_ him right now or anything. 

“Is Tony in the Tower?” she ventures.

“He is not. Mr. Stark is presently at SHIELD, in a meeting with Director Fury. He arrived there quite early this morning. I am not certain when he will return. I can convey a message, if you like.”

Before Darcy can even begin to think what a message to Tony ought to say, JARVIS adds, in a slightly different tone, “You have visitors. Agents Ward and Shelton of SHIELD are requesting permission to enter your rooms.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, Ms. Lewis.”

“What the hell do they want? I haven’t talked to anyone at SHIELD since I left New Mexico, why would they…” 

And just like that, Darcy’s stomach plummets. She has a sudden, horrible suspicion as to why Tony rushed off first thing this morning for a meeting with his least favorite spymaster. 

Darcy has never been interesting SHIELD in herself. It was her connection to Jane that got them on her case last time. After Thor went back to Asgard, she signed a NDA, got reimbursed for her iPod (although not for the thousands of dollars she’d poured into her music library, the assholes) and assumed that was the last she’d ever see of them. And while, granted, she stayed connected to Jane, the fact that she knew about Thor’s existence wasn’t the big threat to national security it had been before the Battle of Manhattan. Everyone knew who Thor was at this point. He’d been voted the most popular Avenger last year, narrowly beating out Cap with Iron Man holding steady at #2 for the third year running.

But with Jane and Thor on Asgard, the two people in this world that Darcy is most closely connected are Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, and Darcy doubts that SHIELD has ever lost interest in either of them for a single moment. And it probably goes without saying that the significant others of parties of interest were subject to scrutiny themselves. Pepper Potts was a known quantity to SHIELD, an ally even, as the CEO of Stark Industries. Darcy was far less so. 

It was possible that when the story broke about Darcy being Tony’s soulmate, they opened an investigation on a certain level. But when today’s story broke, about Darcy having “a history of faking soulmarks”, SHIELD suddenly had to regard the possibility that their golden goose had fallen into under the influence of a con artist who had anything but positive feelings towards their organization.

Whether Tony had figured that out on his own when he saw the article first thing that morning, or whether Nick Fury had decided to lose no more time interrogating his wayward contractor and summoned him for a meeting, the meeting is about her. And it must not be going very well, because they’ve been at it for hours, and now there are SHIELD agents knocking on her door. 

Probably to haul her off to an interrogation of her own.

“JARVIS.” Darcy had to swallow a couple of times before her mouth stopped feeling so dry. “Urgent message for Tony.

“Hi, Tony. So, do you know why there are a couple of SHIELD agents here looking for me? I know you guys in the Avengers are all cozy with SHIELD, but honestly, they were complete dicks to us in New Mexico, and I don’t really want to let them in unless I have to. Or like, the fate of the world depends on it somehow. I feel like it’s really, really unlikely that letting SHIELD goons paw through my crap has anything to do with the fate of the world, but stranger things have happened, I guess, so…let me know. Preferably before they get impatient and just blast through the wall with their dinky little ray guns or whatever.

Darcy exhales deeply. “Okay J, you can send that.”

“Transmitting,” says JARVIS. “Might you perhaps be more comfortable waiting for a reply in the secured room? I do not anticipate that Agent Ward will succeed in his present efforts to override my passcodes to gain entry, but I believe Mr. Stark would recommend that you take precautions.”

“What the hell—and what secured room?”

“There is a hidden panel in the wall of your bedroom. I am retracting it now.”

A patch of wall between the walk-in and the bathroom splits in two and reveals a small, softy lit closet equipped with a narrow bed, a glowing panel containing some kind of computer interface, and a shelf containing books and electronic and digital devices sitting just above a tiny kitchenette that includes a sink, microwave, and mini-fridge. Yet another tiny door slides back to reveal a tiny bathroom, just on the other side of the wall from the big one.

“A panic room,” Darcy says.

“Mr. Stark does not care for that name, but yes, that is its function.”

“Suits me just fine. Will Tony still be able to reach me in here?”

“Of course, Ms. Lewis. In fact, since I am required to notify him when you access the secured room, you will almost certainly be hearing from him quite soon.”

“You could have led with that, buddy.” She hadn’t tried to phone Tony because she didn’t want to ever be the kind of nagging, needy soulmate who calls people at work when it’s not a real emergency, but she could really do with hearing his voice right now. 

“Apologies, Ms. Lewis.”

Darcy watches the clock. Exactly five minutes and 37 seconds after she enters the room, the screen on the wall lights up with an incoming video call from Tony.

“JARVIS, block video on my end when I accept the call.” She taps the screen. “Morning cellmate. I mean, roommate.”

“Hi babe,” says Tony, blinking at the screen, like the lack of video on her end is an unwelcome surprise. “Tell me something: if I brought you the still-beating heart of my enemies, would that win me any points? Get you a little hot under the collar, maybe?”

Darcy drops her head into her hand. This is why she didn’t want him to see her face. She’s not ready for him to know just how _relieved_ she feels right now, seeing him. “Not so much a knick-knack person, Tony.”

“Huh. Guess not.” He smiles tightly. 

“So…you got my message?”

“I didn’t get a chance to read it yet, but JARVIS helpfully informed me that a couple of SHIELD agents are attempting to _infiltrate my soulmate’s personal living quarters._ ”

The last half of the sentence is shouted, not at Darcy, but at someone standing off-camera. Darcy hears faint voices, some of which sound angry, others sounding apologetic. Tony lowers his camera slightly, which is when Darcy realizes he’s wearing the Iron Man suit.

“So yeah, tiny bit busy here,” he continues, giving Darcy a killer smile, “but don’t worry about Thing One and Thing Two out there. Fortunately for everyone involved—and I do mean _everyone_ , Nick, because if your adorable lickspittles had _actually_ managed to get into Darcy’s rooms, we would be having a problem here that couldn’t be solved with money or favors or deals—fortunately for _all_ of us, Steve came home last night. I just talked to him, he’s at the Tower and on his way to your floor.” Tony makes a show of tapping his chin. “Wow, I wonder what _Captain America_ is going to do when he finds a couple of creeps trying to break into a woman’s bedroom? Actually, I think there was an episode of his TV show like that. Not the cartoon, the super cheesy live action show from the 70’s with the sad theme music.”

“Steve’s home?” Darcy demands, sensing the need to put an end to the monologue before it gets any more out of hand.

“Yeah.” It’s amazing to watch how Tony’s body language changes completely whenever he addresses Darcy directly. The tension rushes out of his shoulders, and his smile gets smaller, more natural. “He’ll be there any second. He’s got the safe room key codes, so he can come get you when he’s taken care of the two deadest agents in Deadonia.”

Tension floods out of Darcy so quickly that she feels lightheaded. She doesn’t know Steve, or any of the other Avengers besides Tony and Bruce, particularly well, but she’d felt like they clicked unexpectedly well during one party where they’d ended up playing Cards Against Humanity for hours. Darcy got the feeling that people were usually too flustered to talk to him. Just Darcy’s luck that Thor had been her first Avenger. Steve was tall and blonde, Thor was taller and blonder. Steve was really old but looked really young; Thor was…well, you got the picture. He’d given Darcy his phone number that night, and it had taken weeks before Darcy realized, _oh shit, Steve had given her his_ phone number. It was too late to call by then; Steve was in D.C. and it would just have been awkward. But Darcy could use a solid, comforting presence like Steve just now.

God, this was getting out of hand. Just over a week of having a soulmate, and she was already having trouble coping when someone wasn’t there to hold her hand through a crisis. It was way too early in the game for her to risk shedding her crusty defensive exterior. 

“Darcy,” says Tony. “Actually, hold on.”

The screen tilts wildly, and Darcy had the impression that Tony was striding rapidly in the direction of whatever temporary privacy he could find at the Triskelion or the Helicarrier or wherever he was.

“Hey,” he says, as the camera rights itself again. “So, real quick before Steve gets here: are you okay?”

“God.” Darcy chokes out a laugh. “I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve made you ask me that since we exchanged Words.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Tony smirks. “Actually, I just ordered JARVIS to start production on your suit. Fabrications’ due to begin in 48 hours and JARVIS needs to take your measurements.”

“Iron. Maiden.” Darcy reminds him.

“I’ll get over it. Or I’ll wear you down, one way or another.” He clears his throat. “I guess you know about the thing.”

“The article?”

“That thing, yeah.”

“JARVIS gave me the gist, I couldn’t really bring myself to, you know…read it.”

“I knew the instant, meteoric fame was going to require some adjusting to, but I didn’t actually count on me painting a target on your back.”

“Do you _need_ me to say that this wasn’t your fault, because I can scrape together some sincerity if I have to.”

“I couldn’t risk you hurting yourself that way. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

Darcy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Since when are _we_ investigative reporters, Tony?”

“I am a soulmate of many talents. Aaand there’s the text from Steve, indicating that the kids in the hall are all tidied up. Score one for justice. I’ll let you go before he gatecrashes us.” Tony hesitates, mouth partly open. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Bye,” Darcy says softly.

The screen goes black, just as Darcy hears a knock on the panic room door. And since the idea of anyone _knocking_ on a hydraulic door modeled on the doors in the Starship Enterprise is completely ridiculous, so that could only mean one thing: 

Captain America was here.


	9. Chapter 9

9.

“I’m not saying you should eat ice cream for lunch every day,” Steve explains, as he digs deep into the communal freezer and piles ice cream tubs on the marble counter. “But sugar is good for you when you’ve had a shock.”

“I completely agree,” says Darcy, prying the lid off a tub labeled _Blue Moon_. “It’s just, I usually take my sugar in the form of a margarita.”

An hour ago, Steve had appeared at the door of the panic room wearing a grim expression that didn’t soften until Darcy assured him, two or three times, that she was fine. She still doesn’t know what Steve did with the two SHIELD agents who tried to break into her suite. Are they being interrogated? Did Steve arrest them? _Can_ Captain America arrest people? What exactly were they planning to do with her, anyway?

Darcy really wants to grill Steve until he’s coughed up all the details, but there’s something about the appreciative way he’s heaping scoops of vanilla bean into his bowl and smothering it with salted caramel sauce that undoes her steely resolve. He looks like someone who’s needed a break for a long time, and is planning to take advantage of the lull between crises to scarf down as much unhealthy food as possible. Darcy can respect that.

“So, how’s DC treating you?” she says, scooping some pale blue ice cream into her own bowl. “Full of fun and adventure?”

“Yeah, it’s a real party.” 

His tone is wry, his expression closed off. Darcy makes room for him at the bar and he comes to sit beside her, hunching low over his bowl.

“You get to do the tourist thing at all? Swing by the Lincoln Memorial on Sundays, climb the Washington Monument?”

“The Washington Monument’s closed right now.” Steve smirks. “But yes, actually. They, uh, recognized me and let me in. I try not to do that, but I was really curious what it was like inside.”

“Hey, no judgment here.” 

Steve clears his throat, and then, looking self-conscious, deliberately changed the subject. “So…” he say. “You and Tony, huh?”

There’s no reason in the world why that question should drive her shoulders up around her ears. 

“Yeah.” Darcy clears her throat. “We’re…you know. Trying out the soulmate thing.”

Steve frowns a little. Not disapproving, but confused. “Trying it out?”

“Yeah. We’re taking it slowly, I guess.” Darcy finally works up the nerve to taste her ice cream. It’s good—light, citrusy.

“Because…he’s Tony?” Steve ventures.

It’s weird how fast that gets Darcy’s back up, like she can’t deal with people implying that Tony might be difficult, even though Tony Stark practically redefines _difficult_ for future generations. “Tony’s awesome, actually. He’s been great.” 

“Okay.” Steve nods. “But..?”

“No, there are no buts!” Darcy grimaces, then drops her spoon, defeated. “Okay, fine. It’s me. I’m the but.”

Steve Rogers is probably the only person on earth who could absorb that statement and not immediately make a joke out of it. Or maybe Darcy is just a little too used to talking to Tony. And Bruce, whose sense of humor is a lot more juvenile than you would expect from a guy with Dostoyevsky on his bookshelves. 

Steve simply maintains an open, inviting silence, while Darcy sits on her barstool and wrestles with her dignity. The thing is, she doesn’t really _know_ Steve. He’s easy to talk to, but she’s not sure if he stays quiet a lot because he actually wants to listen to people’s problems, or if it’s because he’s stranded in the 21st century and he’s tired of people being patient and understanding when he says the wrong thing.

“I was on the phone with Tony earlier,” Steve says, like he thinks he needs to fill the silence. “He was mad about that newspaper article. I mean, really livid. Then JARVIS told him there were SHIELD agents at your door, and—honestly, Darcy, even knowing you might be in danger, my first thought was that I needed to get to SHIELD and keep Tony from starting a war.”

Darcy blinks at him. “Obviously you’re using the word ‘war’ in the metaphorical sense.”

Steve shoves an entire scoop of ice cream in his mouth, because apparently the super-soldier serum made him immune to ice cream migraines.

“Um.” Darcy thinks about how Tony had looked and sounded when she spoke to him earlier. She’d thought he was okay. Angry, but she’d seen him angrier. Is Steve exaggerating, or does he know something Darcy doesn’t?

“Do you need to…” Darcy gestures vaguely. “I mean, if someone needs to keep an eye on Tony, I’m okay here, so…” 

Steve shakes his head. “Last I checked, Nat was managing him.”

“I thought she was in DC.”

“We both were. We’re here for a few days now.” Steve picks his bowl, now empty, and carries it back to the freezer. “Should I try the maple walnut next, or the butter brickle?” 

“I don’t think you’d appreciate the maple as much after you’ve just eaten a bowl of caramel,” she says automatically. “Is Tony is mad at me at all?”

Steve, still looking between two ice cream tubs, doesn’t seem to hear her at first. Then his head pops up, his eyebrows hunching low over his eyes. “What?” he says, sounding bewildered. “Why would he be mad at _you?_ ”

Darcy shrugs. She can’t really bring herself to put it into words. Not because it defies her powers of articulation, but because it’s really stupid, and her stupid fears aren’t going to go away just because Captain America points out to her how irrational she’s being.

“I’m sure he sounded like he was angry when you talked to him,” Steve continues. “But it wasn’t because you did anything wrong.”

“I didn’t say I did anything wrong,” Darcy points out. “But thanks.”

Steve gives her a scrutinizing look, then puts his bowl down, picks up the entire tub of butter brickle, and walks back over to the bar. He eats a spoonful, then says, “If anyone understands how it feels to have people writing phony stories about you in the newspapers, it’s gonna be Tony.”

“I know. I do, I know that.” She lets out a long breath. “This one’s tricky, though. It wasn’t all lies.”

“I think most of the crazy stories they print about people have at least a loose basis in fact, but that’s not the same thing as being truthful.”

Something in Steve’s tone makes Darcy wonder if Steve keeps up with his own press coverage. It’s rare to find a story about Captain America that isn’t adoring, but maybe that isn’t the point. Maybe flattering lies are just as soul-killing as malicious ones, once you’ve heard enough of them.

Darcy draws her finger through the condensation on the marble bar top. “Tony and I still don’t really know each other all that well. We’re like, two weeks out from the day we exchanged Words.”

“Darcy.” Steve’s voice is soft, chiding. “This is the longest you and I have ever talked, but…I read the article, okay? And I _know_ you would never do any of the stuff it accused you of doing.. Tony’s your _soulmate_. I promise you, he’s giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

Darcy sighs. She was _that_ close to letting Steve talk her down, and then he had to go and say that _word_.

“Most of the stuff people believe about soulmates is bullshit, you know?” she says. “I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, but it’s true. Besides, Tony’s—he has a complicated relationship with the whole concept.” 

She doesn’t bother adding that her issues with the soulmate question put Tony’s to shame. Not everything is about her.

“Well, who doesn’t?” Steve shrugs.

Darcy freezes. Slowly, she lifts her head to stare. That is _not_ something she expected Captain America to say. Captain America is supposed to believe in soulmates the way he’s supposed to believe in democracy and justice and Disney.

“My soulmate was a man,” he says, in a gentle tone that hits Darcy like a superpowered fist to the gut. “When I was growing up, that sort of thing could get you into trouble. You’d swear it was a platonic match, that you were just best friends, and…I guess for some people who had same-sex soulmates that was true. But it wasn’t for us. Plus,” he adds, as Darcy’s face continues to drain white, “My soulmate is _dead_. For a long time, I thought that meant my fate was sealed. But now? Even if he—even if I hadn’t lost him, I’m in the future now. We would have been separated anyway. Does that mean I’m doomed? Am I not allowed to ever be happy again?”

“Steve,” Darcy whispers, because she knows that her damage makes her kind act of self-centered sometimes, but she really feels like a _heel_. Granted, not everyone finds their soulmate, so there was no guarantee that Steve had found his before his plane crashed, but there was an equally likely chance that he had, and anyway, he was born in _1918_ , so of _course_ his soulmate is dead. 

She really has to learn to think before she opens her mouth.

“It’s ok.” Steve stuffs a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth, as if to prove it. “I don’t dwell on it that much anymore. But I promise, soulmates are complicated for everyone.”

“If you say so,” says Darcy, dubious, but not sarcastic. She’d like to believe that Steve knows what he’s talking about it. She’d like to think that she isn’t the only person who occasionally wonders if words like _destiny_ are just code for _trapped_.

“I gotta say, though,” Steven continues, looking down at his bowl, “I don’t see why Tony wouldn’t go for you even if you didn’t have each other’s Words. You’re a good person, you’re the same kind of smart he is, and you’re _really_ easy on the eyes, if it isn’t too forward of me to say so. I don’t think he feels like fate’s dealing him a raw hand, here.”

The patron saint of awkward conversations must be watching over Darcy, because at that very moment, before she has to think of a something to say in reply, Bruce comes wandering into the kitchen. He heads straight for the cabinets, takes out a tub of pretzels that’s half as tall as Darcy and bigger around than her hips. Then he looks back at them and blinks. Darcy gives a little wave.

“Hi,” says Bruce, putting the pretzels down and walking over to Steve, holding out his hand. “Steve, hey, man. When did you get back?”

Steve grasps Bruce’s hand and gives him a warm smile. “Just now,” Steve tells him, with a wry smile. “And just in time, apparently.”

Bruce looks confused. “Do we have a mission? Do you need me?”

“No, it’s taken care of. It was just…” 

Steve glances at Darcy, which confuses her for an instant. Then it clicks: he’s being delicate. She’s spent so much time with Tony recently that she’d forgotten what delicacy looked like.

“It’s fine,” she tells him. “Bruce is my bestie, he’s caught up on the background reading.” She looks at Bruce. “Tony sent Steve to rescue me from a couple of SHIELD agents today.”

“What—rescue you? From SHIELD?” Bruce frowns. “What happened? Why didn’t you call me?”

Steve’s mouth falls open, like this is the first time he’s ever seen Bruce admit to wanting to be included in a confrontation. Darcy steps in to save him.

“The Daily Bugle ran an article about me today,” she says, careful to hit the right note between anger and flippancy that will let Bruce know she’s more or less over it. “It was full of juicy details about how Tony Stark’s soulmate has a history of running fake soulmark scams.” 

Bruce sort of goldfishes at them with his mouth. “Okay, that’s…horrible, but what does that have to do with SHIELD?”

Steve answers first. Which is good, because Darcy still hasn’t figured that part out completely. 

“They were afraid she was hired to infiltrate Stark Industries and steal the plans for the Iron Man armor,” he says flatly.

“Whoah, what, seriously?” Darcy bursts out laughing. “Okay, one, building me a suit was entirely Tony’s idea—”

“Tony’s building you a suit?” says Steve, head whipping around.

“And two, why in the world would I give it to someone else after I was in control of it?” She narrows her eyes. “Wait, does Tony know that’s what they were thinking? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He knows. I think he’d already figured it out on his own, but I told him anyway.” Steve grimaces. “I, uh, I get automatically copied on all action items related to any member of the Avengers. That’s how I knew I was needed here. Tony…doesn’t get copied.”

Darcy guesses that makes sense; Steve is the team leader, so in the eyes of SHIELD it’s probably his job to get the rest of the Avengers up to speed. But Bruce is arching his eyebrows, and the expression on his face makes Darcy think that Bruce is interpreting this revelation differently.

“Did they forget you were in the loop on this one?” he asks. “Or did they just assume you’d fall in line?” There’s a faint hint of tension in his voice, and his tone borders on sarcasm. It strikes Darcy that Bruce has good reason to feel suspicious about Avengers team members being left outside SHIELD’s direct chain of communication .

“I’ll be sure to find out,” Steve replies, and his tone grim. 

Bruce looks over at Darcy. Whatever he sees in her face makes him take a step closer to her and rest a hand lightly against her back, his fingers rubbing at the spot between her shoulder blades that remains permanently knotted with tension. “You’re okay?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah, no, they never even laid eyes on me,” she says airily, although she knows that isn’t what Bruce is really asking. “Incidentally, did you know Tony built a secret panic bunker into my suite?”

“Of course I did,” Bruce says. “Who do you think talked him out of making your entire suite a panic bunker?”

Darcy lets out a huge sigh and slumps against the bar, leaning her forehead against the heels of her hands. Either two weeks of being housebound are catching up to her all in a single breath, or Tony’s overprotective impulses are striking the wrong nerve this morning. She’s suddenly claustrophobic in a way she’s only been in nightmares before now. 

She can’t acknowledging this out loud without triggering a display of even more protectiveness from Bruce and maybe Steve, so Darcy chooses instead to get up and carry her bowl of melting ice cream over to the sink.

“I just don’t understand what they were expecting to achieve,” Steve says to Bruce. “Surely Nick knows better than to think Tony would ever work with SHIELD again if they interfered with his private concerns that way.”

Darcy wondered if _Tony Stark’s Private Concern_ is her special SHIELD code name.

“Fury has people he’s answerable to,” says Bruce. “It might not have been his decision.”

“Natasha should be bringing Tony back here pretty soon. They’ll have found out everything by now, they’ll fill us in.”

It’s on the tip of Darcy’s tongue to ask whether she gets to sit in on that briefing, but she’s worried Steve might not realize she’s being sarcastic, and then she’ll have to punch him, and Steve will be really sad when she breaks her hand against his jaw.

“I’m visiting the litter box, if anyone needs me,” Darcy says to no one in particular, and leaves the kitchen in the direction of the nearest bathroom. This also happens to be the general direction of her suite, so she just keeps walking until she reaches her door, which opens for her automatically.

When it shuts behind her, she throws herself against a smooth section of blank wall. Her hunched back straightens, and it gets easier to take deep breaths. After a few in-and-outs from the bottom of her diaphragm, she clears her throat. “JARVIS?”

“Yes, Miss Lewis?”

“I need to leave the Tower, and I need to do it without you telling another living soul. Is that possible, or am I gonna have to jump out a window?”


End file.
